Economics BEAT Seminar - Jan Hausfeld - University of Amsterdam - "Attention and Discrimination"

Abstract main: Managers decide on the promotion/dismissal of workers. To accurately evaluate the worker’s effort/performance, managers must pay attention to all workers. However, because people cannot pay attention to everyone, they must decide how to allocate their attention. This selective focus is likely affected by stereotypes, so called “attention discrimination” -- for example, a negatively stereotyped worker might receive less attention when the manager has to find the best worker, but receives more attention when the manager has to find the worst worker. We study how stereotypes affect manager's attention (measured via eye-tracking) and evaluations of workers when not everyone can be tracked. We find that managers’ attention and evaluation is affected by stereotypes. The negatively stereotyped workers receive less attention when the manager has to detect the “best” performers, and receive more attention and accurate evaluations when mangers find the “worst”. Importantly, these differences in attention and evaluation are not driven by worker’s true performance and certain workers suffer more. Showing continuous performance information does not overrule stereotypes. We conclude that since attention is scarce, “attention discrimination” affects these promotion/dismissal decisions leading to suboptimal decisions as the “best”/’worst” performers are not accurately detected.

Abstract second (if time allows): We show that intermediaries expect hiring managers to prefer candidates of the same gender as the manager (expected same-gender favoritism) (link to paper https://ahirmas.com/uploads/JMP.pdf)