We study the impact of using informational messaging aimed at encouraging women to seek a career in technology and the resulting trade-offs for organizations pursuing recruitment strategies of this kind. Our treatment, implemented through two field experiments among potential applicants to a five-month software-coding program targeted at low-income women in Peru and Mexico, counterbalances the strong male stereotype associated with a career in tech. Although our informational messages substantially increase application rates, including candidates at the top of the cognitive skill distribution, they introduce negative selection on cognitive skills, implying a higher cost of screening. Moreover, we observe selection on the noncognitive dimensions addressed with the treatment (e.g., stronger gender stereotypes and traditional norms). This points to the barriers that preclude more women from applying to tech positions, as well as the trade-offs for organizations of adopting such a strategy. This paper was accepted by Alfonso Gambardella, business strategy.
{"title":"More Women in Tech? Evidence from a Field Experiment Addressing Social Identity","authors":"Lucía Del Carpio, Maria Guadalupe","doi":"10.1287/mnsc.2021.4035","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1287/mnsc.2021.4035","url":null,"abstract":"We study the impact of using informational messaging aimed at encouraging women to seek a career in technology and the resulting trade-offs for organizations pursuing recruitment strategies of this kind. Our treatment, implemented through two field experiments among potential applicants to a five-month software-coding program targeted at low-income women in Peru and Mexico, counterbalances the strong male stereotype associated with a career in tech. Although our informational messages substantially increase application rates, including candidates at the top of the cognitive skill distribution, they introduce negative selection on cognitive skills, implying a higher cost of screening. Moreover, we observe selection on the noncognitive dimensions addressed with the treatment (e.g., stronger gender stereotypes and traditional norms). This points to the barriers that preclude more women from applying to tech positions, as well as the trade-offs for organizations of adopting such a strategy. This paper was accepted by Alfonso Gambardella, business strategy.","PeriodicalId":345692,"journal":{"name":"Political Methods: Experiments & Experimental Design eJournal","volume":"05 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2018-10-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"130586382","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
We experimentally study information transmission by experts motivated by their reputation for being well-informed. In our game of reputational cheap talk, a reporter privately observes information about a state of the world and sends a message to an evaluator; the evaluator uses the message and the realized state of the world to assess the reporter’s informativeness. We manipulate the key driver of misreporting incentives: the uncertainty about the phenomenon to forecast. We highlight three findings. First, misreporting information is pervasive even when truthful information transmission can be an equilibrium strategy. Second, consistent with the theory, reporters are more likely to transmit information truthfully when there is more uncertainty on the state. Third, evaluators have difficulty learning reporters’ strategies and, contrary to the theory, assessments react more strongly to message accuracy when reporters are more likely to misreport. In a simpler environment with computerized evaluators, reporters learn to best reply to evaluators’ behavior and, when the state is highly uncertain and evaluators are credulous, to transmit information truthfully. This paper was accepted by Yan Chen, behavioral economics and decision analysis. Funding: Financial support from the H2020 European Research Council [Grant 295835 (EVALIDEA)] is gratefully acknowledged. Supplemental Material: The online appendix and data are available at https://doi.org/10.1287/mnsc.2022.4629 .
{"title":"Looking into Crystal Balls: A Laboratory Experiment on Reputational Cheap Talk","authors":"Debrah Meloso, Salvatore Nunnari, M. Ottaviani","doi":"10.1287/mnsc.2022.4629","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1287/mnsc.2022.4629","url":null,"abstract":"We experimentally study information transmission by experts motivated by their reputation for being well-informed. In our game of reputational cheap talk, a reporter privately observes information about a state of the world and sends a message to an evaluator; the evaluator uses the message and the realized state of the world to assess the reporter’s informativeness. We manipulate the key driver of misreporting incentives: the uncertainty about the phenomenon to forecast. We highlight three findings. First, misreporting information is pervasive even when truthful information transmission can be an equilibrium strategy. Second, consistent with the theory, reporters are more likely to transmit information truthfully when there is more uncertainty on the state. Third, evaluators have difficulty learning reporters’ strategies and, contrary to the theory, assessments react more strongly to message accuracy when reporters are more likely to misreport. In a simpler environment with computerized evaluators, reporters learn to best reply to evaluators’ behavior and, when the state is highly uncertain and evaluators are credulous, to transmit information truthfully. This paper was accepted by Yan Chen, behavioral economics and decision analysis. Funding: Financial support from the H2020 European Research Council [Grant 295835 (EVALIDEA)] is gratefully acknowledged. Supplemental Material: The online appendix and data are available at https://doi.org/10.1287/mnsc.2022.4629 .","PeriodicalId":345692,"journal":{"name":"Political Methods: Experiments & Experimental Design eJournal","volume":"34 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2018-10-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"132165668","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
G. Dosi, M. C. Pereira, A. Roventini, M. Virgillito
In this work we discuss the research findings from the labour-augmented Schumpeter meeting Keynes (K S) agent-based model. It comprises comparative dynamics experiments on an artificial economy populated by heterogeneous, interacting agents, as workers, firms, banks and the government. The exercises are characterized by different degrees of labour flexibility, or by institutional shocks entailing labour market structural reforms, wherein the phenomenon of hysteresis is endogenous and pervasive. The K S model constitutes a laboratory to evaluate the effects of new institutional arrangements as active/passive labour market policies, and fiscal austerity. In this perspective, the model allows mimicking many of the customary policy responses which the European Union and many Latin American countries have embraced in reaction to the recent economic crises. The obtained results seem to indicate, however, that most of the proposed policies are likely inadequate to tackle the short-term crises consequences, and even risk demoting the long-run economic prospects. More objectively, the conclusions offer a possible explanation to the negative path traversed by economies like Brazil, where many of the mentioned policies were applied in a short period, and hint about some risks ahead.
{"title":"The Labour-Augmented K S Model: A Laboratory for the Analysis of Institutional and Policy Regimes","authors":"G. Dosi, M. C. Pereira, A. Roventini, M. Virgillito","doi":"10.2139/ssrn.3232487","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.3232487","url":null,"abstract":"In this work we discuss the research findings from the labour-augmented Schumpeter meeting Keynes (K S) agent-based model. It comprises comparative dynamics experiments on an artificial economy populated by heterogeneous, interacting agents, as workers, firms, banks and the government. The exercises are characterized by different degrees of labour flexibility, or by institutional shocks entailing labour market structural reforms, wherein the phenomenon of hysteresis is endogenous and pervasive. The K S model constitutes a laboratory to evaluate the effects of new institutional arrangements as active/passive labour market policies, and fiscal austerity. In this perspective, the model allows mimicking many of the customary policy responses which the European Union and many Latin American countries have embraced in reaction to the recent economic crises. The obtained results seem to indicate, however, that most of the proposed policies are likely inadequate to tackle the short-term crises consequences, and even risk demoting the long-run economic prospects. More objectively, the conclusions offer a possible explanation to the negative path traversed by economies like Brazil, where many of the mentioned policies were applied in a short period, and hint about some risks ahead.","PeriodicalId":345692,"journal":{"name":"Political Methods: Experiments & Experimental Design eJournal","volume":"48 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2018-08-08","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"130417663","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
John Ifcher, Homa Zarghamee, Daniel Houser, Lina Diaz
John Stuart Mill claimed that "men do not desire merely to be rich, but richer than other men." Do people desire to be richer than others? Or is it that people desire favorable comparisons to others more generally, and being richer is merely a proxy for this ineffable relativity? We conduct an online experiment absent choice in which we measure subjective wellbeing (SWB) before and after an exogenous shock that reveals to subjects how many experimental points they and another subject receive, and whether or not points are worth money. We find that subjects like receiving monetized points significantly more than non-monetized points but dislike being "poorer" than others in monetized and non-monetized points equally, suggesting relative money is valued only for the relative points it represents. We find no evidence that subjects like being "richer" than others. Subgroup analyses reveal women have a strong(er) distaste for being "richer" and "poorer" (than do men), and conservatives have a strong(er) distaste for being "poorer" (than do progressives). Our experimental-SWB approach is easy to administer and can provide some insights a revealed-preference approach cannot, suggesting that it may complement choice-based tasks in future experiments to better estimate preference parameters.
约翰·斯图亚特·密尔(John Stuart Mill)声称:“人们不仅希望变得富有，而且希望比别人更富有。”人们渴望比别人富有吗?还是人们更普遍地希望与他人进行有利的比较，而变得更富有仅仅是这种不可言喻的相对性的一种代表?我们进行了一个没有选择的在线实验，在这个实验中，我们测量了外生冲击之前和之后的主观幸福感(SWB)，这些外生冲击向受试者揭示了他们和另一个受试者获得了多少实验分数，以及这些分数是否值得花钱。我们发现，受试者喜欢获得货币化积分明显多于非货币化积分，但不喜欢在货币化和非货币化积分上比其他人“更穷”，这表明相对货币的价值只取决于它所代表的相对积分。我们没有发现证据表明受试者喜欢比其他人“富有”。分组分析显示，女性对“更富有”和“更贫穷”(比男性)有强烈的厌恶，保守派对“更贫穷”(比进步派)有强烈的厌恶。我们的实验swb方法易于管理，并且可以提供一些揭示偏好方法无法提供的见解，这表明它可以在未来的实验中补充基于选择的任务，以更好地估计偏好参数。
{"title":"Relative Income and Happiness: An Experiment","authors":"John Ifcher, Homa Zarghamee, Daniel Houser, Lina Diaz","doi":"10.2139/ssrn.3249877","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.3249877","url":null,"abstract":"John Stuart Mill claimed that \"men do not desire merely to be rich, but richer than other men.\" Do people desire to be richer than others? Or is it that people desire favorable comparisons to others more generally, and being richer is merely a proxy for this ineffable relativity? We conduct an online experiment absent choice in which we measure subjective wellbeing (SWB) before and after an exogenous shock that reveals to subjects how many experimental points they and another subject receive, and whether or not points are worth money. We find that subjects like receiving monetized points significantly more than non-monetized points but dislike being \"poorer\" than others in monetized and non-monetized points equally, suggesting relative money is valued only for the relative points it represents. We find no evidence that subjects like being \"richer\" than others. Subgroup analyses reveal women have a strong(er) distaste for being \"richer\" and \"poorer\" (than do men), and conservatives have a strong(er) distaste for being \"poorer\" (than do progressives). Our experimental-SWB approach is easy to administer and can provide some insights a revealed-preference approach cannot, suggesting that it may complement choice-based tasks in future experiments to better estimate preference parameters.","PeriodicalId":345692,"journal":{"name":"Political Methods: Experiments & Experimental Design eJournal","volume":"1 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2018-08-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"131292109","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Carly D. Robinson, Jana Gallus, Monica G. Lee, Todd Rogers
Abstract It is common for organizations to offer awards to motivate individual behavior, yet few empirical studies evaluate their effectiveness in the field. We report a randomized field experiment (N = 15,329) that tests the impact of two common types of symbolic awards: pre-announced awards (prospective) and surprise awards (retrospective). The context is U.S. schools, where we explore how awards motivate student attendance. Contrary to our pre-registered hypotheses and organizational leaders’ expectations, the prospective awards did not on average improve behavior, and the retrospective awards decreased subsequent attendance. Moreover, we find a significant negative effect on attendance after prospective incentives were removed, which points to a crowding-out effect. Survey experiments probing the mechanisms suggest that awards may cause these unintended effects by inadvertently signaling that the target behavior (perfect attendance) is neither the social norm nor institutionally expected. In addition, receiving the retrospective award suggests to recipients that they have already outperformed the norm and what was expected of them, hence licensing them to miss school. Exploratory analyses shed further light on differential effects of awards by age and performance.
{"title":"The Demotivating Effect (and Unintended Message) of Awards","authors":"Carly D. Robinson, Jana Gallus, Monica G. Lee, Todd Rogers","doi":"10.2139/ssrn.3219502","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.3219502","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract It is common for organizations to offer awards to motivate individual behavior, yet few empirical studies evaluate their effectiveness in the field. We report a randomized field experiment (N = 15,329) that tests the impact of two common types of symbolic awards: pre-announced awards (prospective) and surprise awards (retrospective). The context is U.S. schools, where we explore how awards motivate student attendance. Contrary to our pre-registered hypotheses and organizational leaders’ expectations, the prospective awards did not on average improve behavior, and the retrospective awards decreased subsequent attendance. Moreover, we find a significant negative effect on attendance after prospective incentives were removed, which points to a crowding-out effect. Survey experiments probing the mechanisms suggest that awards may cause these unintended effects by inadvertently signaling that the target behavior (perfect attendance) is neither the social norm nor institutionally expected. In addition, receiving the retrospective award suggests to recipients that they have already outperformed the norm and what was expected of them, hence licensing them to miss school. Exploratory analyses shed further light on differential effects of awards by age and performance.","PeriodicalId":345692,"journal":{"name":"Political Methods: Experiments & Experimental Design eJournal","volume":"15 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2018-07-24","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"115163551","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Recent experimental research suggests that people behave more cooperatively when the rules governing a strategic interaction (e.g. a public goods game) are modified democratically than when they are modified exogenously. In a related experiment, I show that people are less likely to unilaterally destroy surplus for personal gain when a provisional allocation is chosen democratically than when an identical provisional allocation is imposed exogenously. I also develop a theory of reciprocity that can rationalize the main findings of the endogenous institutions literature, including the ones from this experiment.
{"title":"Democratic Institutions, Reciprocity, and Pro-Social Behavior","authors":"Luca Braghieri","doi":"10.2139/ssrn.3172282","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.3172282","url":null,"abstract":"Recent experimental research suggests that people behave more cooperatively when the rules governing a strategic interaction (e.g. a public goods game) are modified democratically than when they are modified exogenously. In a related experiment, I show that people are less likely to unilaterally destroy surplus for personal gain when a provisional allocation is chosen democratically than when an identical provisional allocation is imposed exogenously. I also develop a theory of reciprocity that can rationalize the main findings of the endogenous institutions literature, including the ones from this experiment.","PeriodicalId":345692,"journal":{"name":"Political Methods: Experiments & Experimental Design eJournal","volume":"28 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2018-07-23","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"125127644","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
A fundamental concern for researchers who analyze and design experiments is that the experimental result might not be externally valid for all policies. Researchers often attempt to assess external validity by comparing data from an experiment to external data. In this essay, I discuss approaches from the treatment effects literature that researchers can use to begin the examination of external validity internally, within the data from a single experiment. I focus on presenting the approaches simply using figures.
{"title":"How to Examine External Validity within an Experiment","authors":"Amanda E. Kowalski","doi":"10.3386/W24834","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3386/W24834","url":null,"abstract":"A fundamental concern for researchers who analyze and design experiments is that the experimental result might not be externally valid for all policies. Researchers often attempt to assess external validity by comparing data from an experiment to external data. In this essay, I discuss approaches from the treatment effects literature that researchers can use to begin the examination of external validity internally, within the data from a single experiment. I focus on presenting the approaches simply using figures.","PeriodicalId":345692,"journal":{"name":"Political Methods: Experiments & Experimental Design eJournal","volume":"378 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2018-07-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"124713888","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
This essay reviews the changing status of single country research in comparative politics, a field defined by the concept of comparison. An analysis of articles published in top general and comparative politics field journals reveals that single country research has evolved from an emphasis on description and theory generation to an emphasis on hypothesis testing and research design. This change is a result of shifting preferences for internal versus external validity combined with the quantitative and causal inference revolutions in the social sciences. A consequence of this shift is a change in substantive focus from macropolitical phenomena to micro-level processes, with consequences for the ability of comparative politics to address many substantive political phenomena that have long been at the center of the field.
{"title":"The Return of the Single Country Study","authors":"Thomas B. Pepinsky","doi":"10.2139/ssrn.3197172","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.3197172","url":null,"abstract":"This essay reviews the changing status of single country research in comparative politics, a field defined by the concept of comparison. An analysis of articles published in top general and comparative politics field journals reveals that single country research has evolved from an emphasis on description and theory generation to an emphasis on hypothesis testing and research design. This change is a result of shifting preferences for internal versus external validity combined with the quantitative and causal inference revolutions in the social sciences. A consequence of this shift is a change in substantive focus from macropolitical phenomena to micro-level processes, with consequences for the ability of comparative politics to address many substantive political phenomena that have long been at the center of the field.","PeriodicalId":345692,"journal":{"name":"Political Methods: Experiments & Experimental Design eJournal","volume":"22 6S 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2018-06-15","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"115944306","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
The Italian judicial system is notoriously slow, with an estimated backlog of 5 million cases. We use a sample of 903,660 court cases in Turin to study the role that various adjudication procedures play in judicial delay. We exploit plausibly exogenous variation in the procedures governing how judges rule on small claims and implement a quasi-experimental approach to estimate the causal effect of less restrictive procedures on judicial delay. For any claim valued below e1,100, judges do not need to provide formal legal justification for their decisions. Judges can rule based on “equita”, i.e., fairness, intuition or commonsense grounds. For cases valued above this threshold, judges do not have such flexibility. Our regression discontinuity estimates, which ex-ploit the variation in these adjudication procedures just above and just below this threshold, reveal that when judges are able to rule without providing legal justification, decisions are made nearly six months faster. We discuss the policy implications in the realm of small claims including methods to ease congestion in Italian courts and efforts to improve judicial performance more broadly.
{"title":"The Role of Legal Justi�?cation in Judicial Performance: Quasi-Experimental Evidence","authors":"P. M. Skiba, Alessandro Melcarne, G. Ramello","doi":"10.2139/ssrn.3195922","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.3195922","url":null,"abstract":"The Italian judicial system is notoriously slow, with an estimated backlog of 5 million cases. We use a sample of 903,660 court cases in Turin to study the role that various adjudication procedures play in judicial delay. We exploit plausibly exogenous variation in the procedures governing how judges rule on small claims and implement a quasi-experimental approach to estimate the causal effect of less restrictive procedures on judicial delay. For any claim valued below e1,100, judges do not need to provide formal legal justification for their decisions. Judges can rule based on “equita”, i.e., fairness, intuition or commonsense grounds. For cases valued above this threshold, judges do not have such flexibility. Our regression discontinuity estimates, which ex-ploit the variation in these adjudication procedures just above and just below this threshold, reveal that when judges are able to rule without providing legal justification, decisions are made nearly six months faster. We discuss the policy implications in the realm of small claims including methods to ease congestion in Italian courts and efforts to improve judicial performance more broadly.","PeriodicalId":345692,"journal":{"name":"Political Methods: Experiments & Experimental Design eJournal","volume":"15 24","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2018-06-14","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"113984656","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
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