The Trade-offs of Letting Local Managers Make Hiring Decisions (with Shannon X. Liu), forthcoming in Management Science.
Winner, 2020 Wharton People Analytics Research Paper Competition
Letting managers have more authority over hiring decisions is becoming an increasingly common management practice among business chains worldwide, yet both theoretical and empirical evidence on its effects remains limited. Local manager hiring (LMH) refers to decentralizing hiring decisions to local business unit managers, rather than relying on the headquarters’ human resource department to make decisions. To assess the impacts of LMH on employee recruitment, productivity, and firm performance, we partnered with a large Chinese firm operating 111 retail stores through a twelve-month field experiment. Results show that LMH leads to an increase in both the mean and variance of individual productivity, yielding a boost in store-level sales of approximately 7–8%. Store-level performance gains were driven by both the direct effects of recruiting higher-performing workers and the indirect effects of positive spillovers from new hires to existing employees. In line with our theory, LMH achieved superior outcomes in stores with better-aligned managerial incentives, more repeat customers, and lower levels of busyness. However, the rise in variance indicates greater inconsistency in hiring outcomes, which led to worse outcomes in some stores. These findings highlight the central trade-off of decentralized hiring: While it can improve average performance by leveraging local knowledge, it also increases the risk of costly hiring mistakes.
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Funding: Chiang Ching-Kuo Foundation, Ronald McKinnon Memorial Fellowship, Stanford King Center on Global Development, Stanford Center at Peking University
Social Comparison and the Value of Performance Trajectory Information: A Field Experiment in the Workplace (with Yucheng Liang), Strategic Management Journal, 2026; 47(7), 2098–2124.
Runner-up, 2022 Industry Studies Association Giarratani Rising Star Award
Finalist, 2022 Strategic Management Society Strategic Human Capital Best Conference Paper Prize
Finalist, 2022 Strategic Management Society Annual Conference Research Methods Paper Prize
Many new employees leave their organizations before realizing the returns to experience. One reason is that they often lack information about how performance evolves with tenure, reducing their willingness to stay. We examine whether providing new workers with such information can improve retention and firm performance. In a large-scale randomized controlled trial at a leading multinational spa chain in China, we sent workers twice-weekly information for 28 weeks showing the performance trajectories of their high-performing senior coworkers. The intervention reduced new worker attrition by 11-12% and increased revenue by 15% in stores with higher shares of new workers. These effects are mostly driven by reduced stress and improved mental health among new workers, as the intervention lowered their beliefs about senior coworkers’ performance during the early stages of their careers. By contrast, sharing only the current performance of a similar-tenure peer had no detectable effects. Overall, this study demonstrates that showing junior workers the “Curricula Vitae” of senior workers mitigates social comparison costs within firms.
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Managerial Attention, Employee Attrition, and Productivity: Evidence from a Field Experiment (with Huayu Xu and Shannon X. Liu), 2nd Revised and Resubmitted to Management Science
Winner, 2021 Strategic Management Society Strategic Human Capital Best Conference Paper Prize
Media Coverage: Rotman Insights Hub, Forbes
Managerial attention is a scarce organizational resource, but little is known about how it should be allocated across employees. We study this question through a six-month randomized controlled trial involving 10,000 workers across 157 stores of a multinational spa chain in China. Each week, managers in treatment stores were required to hold structured, private conversations with selected employees. We compare two allocation rules: directed attention, which targeted workers with negative moods and elevated attrition risk, and random attention, which selected workers independently of their characteristics. Pooling the two treatment arms, increased managerial attention reduced monthly employee attrition by 1.6 percentage points, or 12% relative to the control group. However, the returns to managerial attention depended critically on the allocation rule. Random attention reduced attrition by 16% and increased store revenue by 7.7%, whereas directed attention produced smaller and statistically insignificant effects on both outcomes. Evidence on mechanisms suggests that the allocation rule changed how workers interpreted managerial attention: randomly allocated attention was more readily perceived as managerial care, whereas attention directed toward at-risk workers appeared more tied to managers' own incentives, dampening its effect on retention. Our findings underscore that the allocation of managerial attention shapes its effect on organizational performance.
Corporate Social Responsibility Initiatives and Employee Performance: Evidence from a Field Experiment (with Huayu Xu and Seth Carnahan), R&R at Strategic Management Journal
This research investigates the impact of corporate social responsibility (CSR) initiatives on employee performance. Through a randomized control trial within a multi-national spa chain operating 145 stores in China, we systematically varied employees’ exposure to the company’s CSR efforts. Our findings indicate that increased awareness of CSR activities significantly boosted employee retention and attendance. Notably, the effects of CSR initiatives were mainly driven by those targeting external stakeholders. Further analysis showed that the positive effects of internal CSR initiatives---those directly benefiting employee well-being---were significant only for employees working under competent managers. These findings highlight the potential of external CSR strategies in enhancing employee performance and suggest that the effectiveness of internal CSR activities in broadly improving employee outcomes depends on an alignment between the company's CSR communication and the employees’ actual experiences.
The Impact of #MeToo Movement on Customer-Facing Employees: A Randomized Controlled Trial (with Huayu Xu and Adina Sterling), R&R at Management Science
Information Design in Gig Platforms: The Labor Market Effects of Revealing Competitor Quotes (with Yingkang Xie and Chongyan Sun)
The Impact of AI-Assisted Tools on Employee Performance: A Field Experiment in a Multinational Education Technology Company (with Huayu Xu, Xiaoxuan Jin, and Industry Partner)
The Value of Competitor Demand Information: A Field Experiment in the Hotel Industry (with Robin Han and Industry Partner)
The Value of Managing Up: A Field Experiment in the Workplace (with Achyuta Adhvaryu, Anant Nyshadham, and Huayu Xu)
The Impact of Peer-to-Peer Management Training on Collaboration and Workplace Outcomes: A Randomized Control Trial (with Achyuta Adhvaryu, Anant Nyshadham, and Huayu Xu)