{
  "schema_version": 1,
  "id": "task-choice-response-latency-boundary-2026",
  "canonical_url": "https://brali-lifeos.github.io/evidence/task-choice-response-latency-boundary-2026/",
  "json_url": "https://brali-lifeos.github.io/evidence/task-choice-response-latency-boundary-2026/index.json",
  "decision": "watch",
  "decision_label": "Watch, do not prescribe",
  "reviewed_at": "2026-08-31",
  "reviewed_by": "Brali Evidence Reviewer",
  "source": {
    "title": "Give Me a Choice! A Field Experiment on Task Choice Enabled by Wearables",
    "url": "https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/10591478251400469",
    "type": "plant-level-field-experiment-difference-in-differences",
    "doi": "10.1177/10591478251400469",
    "citation_text": "Kwasnitschka D, Franke H, von Maydell R, Netland T. Production and Operations Management. First published online November 12, 2025.",
    "study_design": "Field study in two comparable manufacturing plants. The plant receiving the choice interface was selected by a plant-level random allocation, and pre/post outcomes were estimated using Difference-in-Differences with machine and time controls and robustness checks. The dataset contained 31,429 work tasks and 66,233 machine status reports; the post-treatment observation window covered three weeks.",
    "population": "Production workers in two plants of one global automotive-industry supplier in Germany and Italy, working in highly automated molding operations and responding to short machine-interruption troubleshooting tasks through wearable devices.",
    "intervention_or_exposure": "The digital assignment interface changed from presenting a single delegated task to presenting a list of all currently available tasks matching the worker's codified skills. Other assignment-system features were intended to remain constant.",
    "outcomes": [
      "Task response time",
      "Accepted-task completion time",
      "Machine-level productivity",
      "Exploratory task-choice behavior",
      "Auxiliary single-item satisfaction with task allocation"
    ]
  },
  "supported_claim": "In this specific automated manufacturing setting, giving workers task choice changed where time was spent rather than improving aggregate productivity: response time rose by about 80 seconds, accepted-task completion time fell by about 26 seconds, and machine productivity did not significantly change. This makes a hybrid choice-versus-delegation design worth further study: offer bounded choice where response latency is not critical, while preserving direct ownership for urgent tasks.",
  "unsupported_or_overstated_claims": [
    "Task autonomy increases productivity in general.",
    "Workers should always choose their own next task.",
    "Direct assignment is generally superior to choice.",
    "The observed response-time and completion-time effects generalize to knowledge work, software teams or office workflows.",
    "The study proves that limiting task choices or notifying fewer workers will improve performance; those are design implications that require testing.",
    "The reported improvement in satisfaction establishes a robust well-being effect.",
    "The results establish an optimal number of task options or an optimal urgency threshold."
  ],
  "limitations": [
    "Only two plants from one company were studied, so plant-level random allocation still leaves only two clusters and limits causal generalization.",
    "The post-treatment period was only three weeks.",
    "The assignment system could not perfectly encode worker skills, so improved matching and motivational autonomy effects cannot be fully disentangled.",
    "The tasks were short troubleshooting responses to machine interruptions, where response latency is unusually important.",
    "Productivity was measured at the machine level rather than directly for individual tasks or workers.",
    "The treatment group started from relatively high productivity, which may have limited detectable gains.",
    "The satisfaction result came from an auxiliary single-item survey and was acknowledged by the authors as anecdotal.",
    "Findings around task choice remain mixed in the broader literature, according to the authors' own discussion."
  ],
  "target_hack_ids": [
    "bounded-task-choice"
  ],
  "target_protocol_ids": [
    "brali:bounded-task-choice"
  ],
  "risk_flags": [],
  "notes": "Keep on watch rather than publishing a general autonomy protocol. Research direction: look for replications in service work, knowledge work and longer-duration tasks, and specifically test hybrid routing where urgent/latency-sensitive work is assigned while non-urgent work offers a constrained choice set. A new work-task-autonomy search lens has been added so Research Scout can pursue this boundary systematically."
}