Publications

Performance reviews in firms are common but controversial. Managers’ subjective appraisals of their employees’ performance and employees’ self-evaluations might be affected by demographic characteristics. As self-evaluations are typically shared with...

Descriptive norms provide social information on others’ typical behaviors and have been shown to lead to prescriptive outcomes by “nudging” individuals towards norm compliance in numerous settings. This paper examines whether descriptive norms lead to...

In labor markets, some individuals have, or believe to have, less data on the determinants of success than others, e.g., due to differential access to technology or role models. We provide experimental evidence on when and how informational differences...

This chapter shows how people in three culturally different contexts, Oman, the United States and Vietnam, deal with trust situations. We offer two trust-fostering mechanisms principals can choose from—a mitigation-based approach, decreasing the principal...

We examine a new intervention to overcome gender biases in hiring, promotion, and job assignments: an “evaluation nudge,” in which people are evaluated jointly rather than separately regarding their future performance. Evaluators are more likely to focus...

What Works

Gender Equality by Design

Iris Bohnet

 

 

 

 

 

 

Gender equality is a moral and a business imperative. But unconscious bias holds us back, and de-biasing people’s minds has proven to be difficult and expensive. Diversity training programs have had...

This article compares the framing of trusting actions and the role of extending trust versus the lack of distrust in achieving exchange efficiencies. It uses experiments to investigate empirically the impact of the presumption of trust. It also reports...

To trust is to risk. When we lend someone money, we make ourselves vulnerable, hoping that the borrower will reward our trust and return the money at a later stage, possibly with interest or a reciprocal favor added. Generally, people are more willing to...

Why is private investment so low in Gulf compared to Western countries? We investigate cross-regional differences in trust and reference points for trustworthiness as possible factors. Experiments controlling for cross-regional differences in institutions...

It is not always easy to make what is seen to be the right choice – choosing an apple over a bar of chocolate, or paying money into a savings account rather than buying a new pair of shoes – but there might be a solution, and it may only take a nudge.

Women, and particularly women in all-female groups, appear to be especially adept at providing public goods in developing countries. We use a one-shot Public Goods game to explore the effect of sex and a group's sex composition on the voluntary provision...