The Role of Experience in Shifting Gender Beliefs: Experimental Evidence (with Miguel A. Fonseca) - Forthcoming at Journal of Economic Behavior and Organisation

Link to Drive: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1iQK6F1fHvQImgiX2lRacxVdePhyQ5ZKr/view?usp=sharing 

Abstract: In labour markets, women are often underrepresented relative to men. This underrepresentation may be due to inaccurate beliefs about ability across genders. Inaccurate beliefs might cause a sampling problem: to have accurate beliefs about a group, one must first collect information about that group. However, inaccurate beliefs may persist due to biased belief updating. We run a stylized hiring experiment to disentangle these two effects. We ask participants to create shortlists from a male and a female pool of workers and give them feedback on the skill of those they shortlist. Based on that information, participants hire workers, and provide us with their beliefs about the distribution of skills in the male and female pots. We study how recruiters update their beliefs as a function of their past shortlisting behaviour, and how they shortlist given their beliefs. As expected, participants were more likely to sample from the pool with the highest subjective mean quality (on average men) and lowest subject variance. Participants were not Bayesian updaters but there were no gender-specific biases in updating. Sampling more from a pool and, somewhat surprisingly, greater time spent engaging in sampling behaviour yield more accurate beliefs. 

Working Papers

How Far I’ll Go: Coordination among Disparate Types (with J.Braxton Gately and Mir Adnan Mahmood)

Link to Drive: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1Np__hKQWNOFKERo_zTqEyGqq3y7WYjI5/view?usp=sharing 

Abstract: Coordination is essential for social and institutional success, yet individuals often face challenges due to heterogeneous preferences over coordination outcomes. We introduce a novel two-player coordination game in which participants are assigned a type from a discrete set and attempt to coordinate with another participant on an action from the same set. The payoff for coordination decreases as the chosen action diverges from their assigned preference type, while miscoordination results in zero payoff. This design captures the tension between the desire to coordinate and individual preferences. Our experimental results reveal that coordination success sharply decreases when participants differ by just one type-step and diminishes further at greater distances, albeit less consistently. Participants predominantly employ three focal strategies—choosing their own type, their partner’s type, or the midpoint between them—indicating heuristic-driven reduction of strategic complexity. Our findings extend the literature on coordination games by exploring behavior in environments with diverse preference structures, highlighting implications for understanding compromise and focal point salience.

Hiring and Ambiguity: A novel discrimination problem (with Surajeet Chakravarty and Miguel A.Fonseca)

Available on Request

Abstract: Many social groups are under-represented across many occupations in the labor force. We consider a novel explanation for why this is the case: Employers may have little or no direct experience with females in specific roles, making the distribution of talent partially unknown. If so, the extent to which employers avoid female applicants can be explained by the degree of ambiguity in their beliefs about the ability distributions of men and women and their own ambiguity aversion. We introduce ambiguity and ambiguity aversion to a model of statistical discrimination. We show that an ambiguity averse employer prefers to hire from a relatively less ambiguous group. We also find that employers they hire from a group less as they become more ambiguity averse towards their beliefs about that group. We tested our model's predictions in a stylized hiring experiment. Participants do prefer to hire from a relatively less ambiguous group. On average, participants do not differ in their reaction to ambiguity about their same gender compared to another gender. However, we find evidence for gender differences in this behaviour. Women are more reactive to ambiguity about men compared to ambiguity about women, while men do not exhibit different reactions with regards to ambiguity. 

Selected Works in Progress