Working Papers

"Meritocracy in Hierarchical Organizations" (with Timm Behler)

Abstract: Competitive promotion mechanisms are often regarded as meritocratic because they select talented players with a high probability. We show that when incorporating promotion-contests into hierarchical organizations, this is not necessarily the case. If the organization’s middle tier can influence the career advancement of players below them, they may block the promotion of talented players out of fear that it could negatively affect their own career prospects. Uncompetitive seniority-based promotion schemes can alleviate this problem. Pessimistically, however, we identify a novel trade-off: the promotion scheme that maximizes expected ability at the middle manager level may not maximize the expected ability at the top tiers of the hierarchy. Whether this trade-off occurs in equilibrium depends crucially on (1) the average ability at the bottom of the hierarchy and (2) how well middle managers can infer the ability of their subordinates.

Work in Progress

"Fragile Men" (with Timm Behler) - partially funded 🎉

Abstract: We design an incentive compatible experiment to explore a novel mechanism that may prevent women from rising to the top of organizations. We hypothesize that men, motivated by social image concerns, value winning (and losing) against women less than winning (and losing) against comparable men. We develop a 2x2 experimental design where we vary (1) the observability of contest outcomes to external players and (2) the probability of losses. We expect men to avoid competing against women when the outcome of the contest is observable to other experimental subjects. Furthermore, we expect this effect to be stronger when the likelihood of losses increase.

"Discouraged by Competition!?" (with Timm Behler and Jens Ewald) - data collected 🎉, paper coming soon

"Contests for Perception" (with Timm Behler)

"Loss-Constrained Lenders and Costly Income Verification"

Pre-PhD Publications

"A variational-autoencoder approach to solve the hidden profile task in hybrid human-machine teams." (with Niccoló Pescetelli and Alex Rutherford). 2022. PloS one, 17(8), e0272168.