Charlotte Cordes

Abstract: Many important decisions that involve the judgement of others are based on recalled information. Such reliance on memory may interact with favoritism—a pervasive source of inefficiency and inequality in organizations. This paper investigates how reliance on memory amplifies favoritism in personnel decisions.  In an online experiment, managers make incentivized hiring decisions regarding workers of varying quality.  Two experimental manipulations isolate the causal effect of memory on favoritism. First, I experimentally vary managers’ preferences for workers. Second, I vary between-subjects whether managers base their choices on workers' quality or on their recall of that quality. I find that when decisions rely on memory, the gap in the hiring probability between favored and non-favored workers more than doubles from 10 to 21 percentage points. Turning to the mechanisms, I find that motivated memories drive around one third of this effect: managers remember favored workers as being of higher quality than unfavored ones. 

Abstract: Procrastination is often attributed to time-inconsistent preferences but may also arise when individuals derive anticipatory utility from holding optimistic beliefs about their future effort costs. This study provides a rigorous empirical test for this notion of  ‘motivated procrastination’.  In a longitudinal experiment over four weeks, individuals must complete a cumbersome task of unknown length. We find that exogenous variation in scope for motivated reasoning results in optimistic beliefs among workers, which causally increase the deferral of work to the future. The roots for biased beliefs stem from motivated memory, such that procrastination may persist even if uncertainty is eventually resolved.

Abstract: Many people struggle to complete long-term projects, such as learning a new language or acquiring a new technical skill. Two major behavioral frictions that prevent the completion of long-term projects are procrastination and forgetting. In theory, procrastination and forgetting can be mitigated with deadlines and reminders, respectively. However, for individuals who procrastinate and forget, only deadlines or only reminders might not suffice to induce project completion. Individuals might still forget to do the task on time (with deadlines only) or still procrastinate endlessly (with reminders only). Based on a theoretical framework, our project empirically assesses the effectiveness of combining reminders and deadlines when multiple tasks need to be completed. We will conduct a field experiment with 4,000 farmers who take mobile-based courses on financial literacy, agribusiness, and farming practices. Participants are randomly assigned to one of five arms: (i) Control, (ii) Reminders, (iii) Deadlines, (iv) Reminders \& Deadlines, and (v) Choice, where participants can self-select into their preferred regime. The experiment will generate detailed data to study the effects on course progression, study dynamics, and learning outcomes.