AME Labour Economics Seminar, at the Swedish Institute for Social Research (SOFI).

Jonas Radbruch from IZA presents "Interview Sequences and the Formation of Subjective Assessments".

This is an in-person only event.

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Abstract

Interviewing is a decisive stage of most processes that match candidates to firms and organizations. This paper studies how and why the interview outcome of a candidate depends on the other candidates seen by the same evaluator. We use large-scale data on admission and hiring interviews, where candidates are quasi-randomly assigned to evaluators and time slots. The results show that the assessment of a candidate decreases in the quality of the other candidates assigned to the same evaluator. The previous candidate has a particularly strong influence, which produces a negative autocorrelation in evaluator decisions of up to 40%. We document that the size of the autocorrelation varies substantially with the evaluator’s decision environment. For example, it increases with the observable similarity between subsequent candidates. We provide evidence that the findings are best explained by a contrast effect model where the reference point is formed through associative recall.