When ownership is used in conjunction with load balancing, items can only be viewed by their owners within Workflow. Ownership takes precedence over load balancing.
An example of when this would be useful is the following. There is a group of underwriters. Claims are load balanced to different tiers of underwriters based on claim value. After the claims are load balanced to different groups of underwriters, a single underwriter within a group can own an item to work on. When an item is owned, only that underwriter can work on the claim.