When You Work with a Superman, Will You Also Fly? An Empirical Study of the Impact of Coworkers on Performance
基于餐厅运营数据，发现服务员对同事销售能力的反应呈非线性：同事能力低时，提升能力会激励员工加倍努力；同事能力高时，进一步提升反而降低员工努力。优化排班可提升销售额约2.48%。
We examine a large operational data set in a casual restaurant setting to study how coworkers’ sales ability level affects other workers’ sales performance. We find that waiters react nonlinearly to their coworkers’ ability. In particular, when coworkers’ overall sales ability is low, increasing this ability may prompt waiters to redouble both upselling and cross-selling efforts. When overall coworkers’ ability is high, however, further increasing their ability may trigger waiters to reduce sales efforts. Our empirical findings imply that, to maximize sales, managers should mix waiters with heterogeneous ability levels during the same shift. Through a counterfactual analysis, we find that considering the inverted U-shaped peer effects when optimizing current waiters’ schedules without changing their utilization may increase total sales by approximately 2.48% at no extra cost. This paper was accepted by Vishal Gaur, operations management.