The Role of Experience in Shifting Gender Beliefs: Experimental Evidence (with Miguel A. Fonseca) - Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization (2025), 237, 107115. 

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

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

Link to Drive: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1cpQe6JU3WR8bBH_vlCFFoX_esGbiQIil/view?usp=sharing 

Abstract: We propose a novel explanation for why many social groups are under-represented across many occupations in the labor force: employers may have little or no direct experience with under-represented groups in specific roles, making the distribution of ability in some occupations partially unknown. If so, the extent to which employers avoid such groups can be explained by the degree of ambiguity in their beliefs about the ability distributions and their own ambiguity aversion. We examine the empirical validity of this hypothesis in two studies, focusing on gender. Participants in a stylized hiring experiment are more likely to hire from a group the less ambiguity there is in the ability distribution. Female recruiters are more averse to ambiguity about male applicants than female applicants. Male recruiters do not have different aversion to ambiguity across genders. In a survey experiment, we elicit beliefs about the ability of men and women in different occupations. Participant's beliefs about women's ability are more ambiguous the more under-represented women are in an occupation, though there is no such relationship for men.

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/1vjzHK17ch2UFvE8BmwTxGDUMF5oQB_rC/view?usp=sharing 

Abstract: Successful societies depend on people's ability to coordinate on a great deal of things, such as institutions, workplace practices, and everyday interactions. Coordination generates mutual benefits, but it is often fragile when individuals hold different preferences. A striking feature of human behaviour is homophily - the tendancy to interact disproportionately with others who are similar. Homophily is usually attributed to a preference for similar people. We propose an alternative explanation. It can arise simply from the strategic tension between the benefits of coordination and the costs of compromise. We formalise this idea in a coordination game where players earn higher payoffs when coordinated outcomes lie slower to their own type. Using an online experiment, we find that coordination is highest when types are identical, falls sharply when types differ, and levels off at greater differences in types. Participants rely on three focal actions - choosing their own type, their partner's types, or the midpoint. This simplifies the multiplicity of equilibria. These results point to a preference for homophily. Coordination succeeds the most between similar people and breaks down with dissimilarities, even though all players would prefer some coordination to none.

Selected Works in Progress