Cluster Events

UPCOMING EVENTS

AGENDA

NEXT SEMINAR 2024/2025

In this section, you will find the information (Speaker/Guest, abstract, date & time slot , location, online registration link..)  about the upcoming seminar during the year. Everyone is welcome, from within ESSEC as well as from outside. 

 Dr. RAHMANI Morvarid  -  Georgia Institute of Technology 

Wednesday,  July 2nd from 12 pm to 1 pm

Room :  N406

Zoom link : https://essec.zoom.us/j/99544455923

Title : Sequential Selection of Candidates: An Experimental Investigation

Abstract : Managers in various fields face a challenging decision-making problem where they must select sequentially presented alternatives without knowledge of the quality of forthcoming options. This "sequential selection" problem is exemplified by the United States Army’s officer evaluation process, where supervising officers evaluate subordinates’ performances and decide whether to give them a "high" rating. Critically, the supervisor’s decision-making is limited by strict limits on the fraction of evaluated officers who can receive high ratings. The paper employs a theoretical model and develops an experimental framework to study how well human subjects select candidates and to explore the determinants of their decisions. Experiments with human subjects reveal that while participants can follow optimal decision-making rules when encountering candidates with extreme performances, they are prone to make errors when encountering non-extreme performers, especially early in the decision sequence. Furthermore, participants in the experiment do not capitalize on the benefits of selecting (a fixed fraction of) candidates from a larger candidate pool, leading to a somewhat counter-intuitively lower per capita performance of selected candidates in larger pools. We find that behavioral mechanisms, such as Search Fatigue and Limited Forward Looking, can explain the deviations from the optimal path. Our findings have important implications for managers who face sequential selection problems. First, managers should be aware of potential decision errors, especially when facing non-extreme performing candidates. Second, managers may be better off selecting from a smaller pool of candidates, which can counter the onset of search fatigue.

If you need more information, please contact matta@essec.edu

Best regards,