Performance-Feedback, 2025
[Working Paper] [Online Appendix] [Experiment Instructions] [Wheeler Institute Research Grant Award]
NYUAD Division of Social Science Working Paper #01010
Co-authored with Jean-Pierre Benoît and Ernesto Reuben
Feedback plays a critical role in shaping beliefs, guiding decisions, and improving performance. We conduct an online experiment to study the nature and effectiveness of qualitative feedback. Although qualitative feedback is widely used, it has received little attention in experimental economics, where the primary focus has been on quantitative feedback. We find a kindness bias: Evaluators give feedback that is more positive than their true opinions. However, recipients anticipate the bias and update their beliefs appropriately. In particular, subjects do not interpret written feedback in a way that is unduly favorable to themselves. This contrasts with work on quantitative feedback that finds a significant upward bias in interpretation. Unlike prior work, we find no difference in how feedback is given to men and women. We identify two channels through which feedback influences decisions: a belief-updating channel and an encouragement channel. Women respond to both, while men are less responsive to encouragement. We find improved performance for individuals who receive feedback that includes more concrete advice.
Optimal Organizational Structure
Competition for Informal and Formal Hiring
An Economic Perspective on Diversity within Organizations, 2025
Interdisciplinary Foundations for Organizational Science and Application: A Dialogue between Psychology and Economics. Edited by G. Grote, A. Guzzo, R. Lavive, and H. Nalbantian. Oxford University Press. (in press)
Co-authored with Ernesto Reuben
NYUAD Division of Social Science Working Paper #0109
This paper summarizes the theoretical and empirical research in economics on the impact of employee diversity on organizational performance, where diversity is predominantly viewed through the lens of gender and ethnicity/nationality. The literature has studied this topic through two types of interactions: horizontal interactions between workers who are peers and vertical interactions between managers and workers. The theory of horizontal interactions highlights the conditions under which diversity is beneficial, such as when different groups bring complementary knowledge, but also when it is costly, as in the case of intergroup communication frictions. The theory of vertical interactions focuses on discrimination against different social groups due to the hierarchical nature of these interactions. Discrimination can result from preferences that favor or disfavor certain groups, or from imperfect information and the use of beliefs about group productivity to infer individual productivity. For both horizontal and vertical interactions, the empirical findings on the impact of diversity are mixed, with varying effects on organizational performance, ranging from positive to negative to no impact. Although this may suggest the field has little to say on the subject, the impact of diversity is often in line with the theoretical predictions. This suggests that for organizations to reap the potential rewards from diversity, they must consider how their context relates to the theory and act accordingly.