Enhancing Decision-Making: The Impact of Information Provision on Worker Task Assignment

Managers often face substantial challenges in assigning the right workers to the right tasks, in part because they have limited information about workers’ relative skills and preferences. We conduct a randomized field experiment in three large garment manufacturing plants in China to study whether providing managers with information about workers improves task allocation and firm outcomes. We provide randomly selected team managers with reports on workers’ relative efficiency across tasks, including overall efficiency, learning speed, efficiency variability by task complexity, and performance in multi-worker versus solo tasks; for a subset of teams, the reports additionally include workers’ task preferences. We find that providing information increases team efficiency by approximately 10 percent and reduces worker turnover within four months by 34–47 percent. Exploring the underlying mechanisms, we find that the intervention substantially improves managers’ knowledge of workers. However, using detailed task-level administrative data, we find that managers incorporate only workers’ relative overall efficiency into their assignment decisions, with no corresponding evidence that they adjust assignments based on the other dimensions of worker performance or preferences. The results show that information provision can improve worker-task matching and organizational performance, while highlighting a gap between managers’ ability to acquire information and their ability to apply multiple dimensions of that information in complex assignment decisions.