David Almog

David Almog, Romain Gauriot, Lionel Page et al.

Powered by the increasing predictive capabilities of machine learning algorithms, artificial intelligence (AI) systems have the potential to overrule human mistakes in many settings. We provide the first field evidence that the use of AI oversight can impact human decision-making. We investigate one of the highest visibility settings where AI oversight has occurred: Hawk-Eye review of umpires in top tennis tournaments. We find that umpires lowered their overall mistake rate after the introduction of Hawk-Eye review, but also that umpires increased the rate at which they called balls in, producing a shift from making Type II errors (calling a ball out when in) to Type I errors (calling a ball in when out). We structurally estimate the psychological costs of being overruled by AI using a model of attention-constrained umpires, and our results suggest that because of these costs, umpires cared 37% more about Type II errors under AI oversight.

David Almog

Concerns about how workers are perceived can deter effective collaboration with artificial intelligence (AI). In a field experiment on a large online labor market, I hired 450 U.S.-based remote workers to complete an image-categorization job assisted by AI recommendations. Workers were incentivized by the prospect of a contract extension based on an HR evaluator's feedback. I find that workers adopt AI recommendations at lower rates when their reliance on AI is visible to the evaluator, resulting in a measurable decline in task performance. The effects are present despite a conservative design in which workers know that the evaluator is explicitly instructed to assess expected accuracy on the same AI-assisted task. This reduction in AI reliance persists even when the evaluator is reassured about workers' strong performance history on the platform, underscoring how difficult these concerns are to alleviate. Leveraging the platform's public feedback feature, I introduce a novel incentive-compatible elicitation method showing that workers fear heavy reliance on AI signals a lack of confidence in their own judgment, a trait they view as essential when collaborating with AI.

David Almog

There is growing enthusiasm about the potential for humans and AI to collaborate by leveraging their respective strengths. Yet in practice, this promise often falls short. This paper uses an online experiment to identify non-instrumental image concerns as a key reason individuals underutilize AI recommendations. I show that concerns about how one is perceived, even when those perceptions carry no monetary consequences, lead participants to disregard AI advice and reduce task performance.