Titled “To Cooperate or Not? Individual Decision-Making in Team Settings,” Professor Xiaoping Chen examined how conflicts between individual and collective rationality shape cooperation in social dilemmas. Drawing on resource dilemmas, public-goods dilemmas, and classic game-theory experiments, she unpacked the decision-making logic behind free-riding in teams. Through research on perceived criticality, rewards and punishments, and “consistent contributors,” she showed that lasting cooperation depends not only on external incentives, but also on members’ internal recognition of their own value, the meaning of their actions, and cooperative norms. The lecture also turned to the age of artificial intelligence, exploring how AI as a “consistent contributor” may influence human cooperation and offering new perspectives on AI-enabled organizational collaboration and future team management.

Date: September 8, 2026
Venue: C110, School of Management
Topic: To Cooperate or Not? Individual Decision-Making in Team Settings
Speaker’s Profile: Xiaoping Chen, Philip M. Condit Endowed Professor, Foster School of Business, University of Washington