Advancement to Candidacy Presentation: “Rational Signals, Biased Ears: Power and Social Learning Inefficiencies”, Anastasiia Morozova, University of California, Santa Barbara

Speaker

Anastasiia Morozova, University of California, Santa Barbara

Biography

Anastasiia Morozova graduated with Honors from Grinnell College with a B.A. in Economics and Political Science. After graduation, she worked as a Research Analyst at the International Monetary Fund Her current research interests include applying behavioral economics toolkit and experimental methods to personnel economics questions. In particular, she is researching the role of hierarchy on information aggregation and transmission within companies.

Title

“Rational Signals, Biased Ears: Power and Social Learning Inefficiencies”

Abstract

In a novel lab-in-the-field experiment within a real company, I leverage endogenous hierarchy to assess the overweighting/underweighting of others' signals relative to their position in the organizational chart. I hypothesize that power, defined as hierarchical distance, distorts belief updating: individuals discount signals from subordinates and overweight those from superiors. I nest variations of canonical social learning tasks and obtain measures of information aggregation quality within an organizational network against Bayesian and DeGroot (naive) benchmarks, subject to informational asymmetries that model relevant workplace scenarios in the aligned-incentives scenario, and identify welfare implications of these heuristics as well as scenarios in which they can be efficiency-improving.

JEL Codes: D83, D85, D91, M12, M14, D7, M5

Event Details

Anastasiia will be presenting her Advancement to Candidacy paper, “Rational Signals, Biased Ears: Power and Social Learning Inefficiencies”. To access the Advancement paper, you must have an active UCSB NetID and password.