Approaching Natural Language as a Business Game from the Bottom Up: A Cognitive Real-Effort Lab Experiment

Economic research examining how business interventions may empower and affect managers’ ability to make decisions more effectively focuses largely on test scores although the interventions may be considered alongside several other outcomes. This paper examines how a business intervention based on a natural language user interface (NLUI) may affect business decisions and routines, therefore, managers’ economic behaviour, pointing at the rule-governed character of natural language. The NLUI is designed to implement a real-effort lab experiment where subjects play the role of managers in defining appropriate business research actions, while the experimenter provides task performance measurement, including heuristics and test scores. By’naturally’ exploiting the NLUI to discover patterns on business data and identify appropriate business actions to find out target markets, we measure the effects of the intervention on subjects’ decision-making and their approaches to collect information from market research. We aim to measure the NLUI effects on dual managerial outcome, namely, the ability to make predictions and categorise. We find that the business intervention positively affects subjects’ ability to categorise, as well as the ability to learn novel categories and recognise new instances within them. Thereby, we find statistically significant effects of the NLUI on subjects’ performance, which allows us to continue with this experimental activity by extending its scope and applications, diversifying business operations.