A Sharp Test of the Portability of Expertise

Abstract

To what extent does expertise depend on context? We observe professionals perform a task that is logically isomorphic to—but contextually distinct from—a familiar task in which they are skilled. We find that performance plummets when contextual cues disappear, suggesting that the expertise we observe on the familiar task is more heuristic than conceptual and does not travel far. The online appendix is available at https://doi.org/10.1287/mnsc.2018.3063 . This paper was accepted by John List, behavioral economics.

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