Human Delegation Behavior in Human-AI Collaboration: The Effect of Contextual Information
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The integration of artificial intelligence (AI) into human decision-making processes at the workplace presents both opportunities and challenges. One promising approach to leverage existing complementary capabilities is allowing humans to delegate individual instances of decision tasks to AI. However, enabling humans to delegate instances effectively requires them to assess several factors. One key factor is the analysis of both their own capabilities and those of the AI in the context of the given task. In this work, we conduct a behavioral study to explore the effects of providing contextual information to support this delegation decision. Specifically, we investigate how contextual information about the AI and the task domain influence humans' delegation decisions to an AI and their impact on the human-AI team performance. Our findings reveal that access to contextual information significantly improves human-AI team performance in delegation settings. Finally, we show that the delegation behavior changes with the different types of contextual information. Overall, this research advances the understanding of computer-supported, collaborative work and provides actionable insights for designing more effective collaborative systems.
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Contextual factors such as task complexity and initiation mode of delegation shape whether consumers accept or resist autonomous AI decision-making.
“Research also suggests that contextual factors, such as task complexity and initiation mode of delegation, shape whether consumers accept or resist autonomous AI decision-making (Adam et al. 2024;Spitzer et al. 2025).”
From Machine marketing: rethinking the customer in the age of generative AI (2026) · cites this paper as Spitzer et al. 2025
Section 5.3 examines whether perceived task difficulty and contextual information influence decisions to delegate to AI, and Section 6.1 reports that different kinds of contextual information change delegation behavior. The paper studies human delegation in workplace-oriented collaboration, not consumer acceptance or resistance, and the retrieved passages do not address who initiates delegation. (LLM, conf=0.86)
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Cited by
Sorted by citations
Fox, S., & Rey, V. F. (2024) · Machine Learning and Knowledge Extraction · doi:10.3390/make6030071 · Cited by 22 · see citing works
Machine marketing: rethinking the customer in the age of generative AI
Sarstedt, M., Adler, S. J., & Imschloss, M. (2026) · Journal of Marketing Analytics · doi:10.1057/s41270-026-00521-y · Cited by 3 · see citing works
- Authors
- Spitzer, P., Holstein, J., Hemmer, P., Vössing, M., Kühl, N., Martin, D., & Satzger, G.
- Affiliations
- Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (DE)
- University of Bayreuth (DE)
- ORCID
- Venue
- Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction
- Published
- 2025-05-02
- Volume
- 9
- Issue
- 2
- Pages
- 1-28
- ISSN
- 2573-0142 (ISSN-L)
- OpenAlex
- W4410061029
- Cited by
- 18
- References
- 12
- Citations by year
- 2026: 14 · 2025: 4
- FWCI
- 19.79
- Type
- journal article
- Language
- en
- Open access
- bronze
- doi.org
- Locations
- Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction (publishedVersion)
- arXiv (Cornell University) (submittedVersion, cc-by-nc-nd)
- arXiv (Cornell University)
- Topics
- Social Sciences › Psychology › Social Psychology › Human-Automation Interaction and Safety
- Social Sciences › Psychology › Social Psychology › Social Robot Interaction and HRI
- Physical Sciences › Computer Science › Human-Computer Interaction › Usability and User Interface Design
- Keywords
- human-AI collaboration, AI delegation, contextual information, computer-supported cooperative work, workplace decision-making
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