Current Research

Interests: Management Accounting, Behavioral and Experimental Economics.

Topics: Fairness, Reciprocity, Managerial Discretion, Knowledge Sharing, Favoritism, Influence Activities, Motivated Reasoning.

Working Papers:

Fabien Ize. Do Managers Use their Employees' Best Insights? (Job Market Paper)

The diffusion of insights is fundamental to organizational success. I experimentally show that managers sometimes ignore their employees’ best insights. Facing problems that they must solve together, managers use their employees’ insights less when they possess discretion over their employee’s compensation and when employees know whether their insights are used. Strikingly, employees also produce their best insights under those conditions. In line with the theory, this seems to be because managers who possess discretion prefer to avoid feeling in debt and having to reciprocate their employees’ insights when employees know that their insights are used.

Eddy Cardinaels, Lucas Mahieux and Fabien Ize. The Effect of Bonus Transparency on Influence Activities and Favoritism in Firms.

We study the effect of bonus transparency on how managers allocate a bonus pool among employees who can perform productive activities but who can also engage in influence activities to receive a preferential treatment from their manager in return. Our experimental results suggest that managers reward both productive and influence activities in their bonus allocations. However, we find that managers increasingly reward employees’ influence activities - but not employees’ productive activities - when bonuses become transparent instead of opaque. Our results further suggest that when employees have heterogeneous identities, bonus transparency increases the effect of influence activities, but also reduces managers’ ingroup favoritism. Last, because the effect of bonus transparency on the effectiveness of influence activities comes from less productive teams, bonus transparency may be more desirable in highly productive teams where it can reduce ingroup favoritism without increasing the effectiveness of influence activities.

Eddy Cardinaels and Fabien Ize. Beyond Transparency: Using Cognitive Dissonance to Improve the Promotions Process in Firms.

We investigate self-deception among managers in a position to make a biased promotion recommendation. In a tournament, managers promote their weaker employees instead of their best in order to compete against them at later stages. However, we find that when their promotion recommendations are transparent, generating cognitive dissonance in managers prompts them to amend their behavior. Managers’ behavior becomes fairer and yet, they tend to feel more unfair – confirming the effect of cognitive dissonance on self-deception. On the other hand, making managers’ promotion recommendations transparent alone does not sufficiently improve their behavior. Our findings have important implications for improving promotions processes and decision-making in organizations.