Seminar in Empirical Microeconomics - Interview Sequences and the Formation of Subjective Assessments
Time
Thursday, 9. November 2023
12:00 - 13:15
Location
F428
Organizer
Chair of Economic Policy
Speaker:
Amelie Schiprowski (University of Bonn)
Interview Sequences and the Formation of Subjective Assessments
Abstract: Interviewing is a decisive stage of most processes that match candidates to firms and organizations. This paper studies how and why a candidate's interview outcome depends on the other candidates interviewed by the same evaluator. We use large-scale data on interviews conducted in high-stakes admission and hiring processes, where candidates are quasi-randomly assigned to evaluators and time slots. We find that an individual's assessment decreases as the quality of other candidates assigned to the same evaluator increases. The previous candidate has a particularly strong impact, leading to a negative autocorrelation in evaluators' votes of up to 40\% and large changes in final admission and hiring decisions. Our findings are best explained by a contrast effect model, where evaluators form a reference point through associative recall. We discuss and evaluate changes in the design of interview processes to mitigate the previous candidate's influence.