Research

In this paper, I investigate why individuals high in narcissism are overrepresented in positions of influence despite being associated with negative organizational outcomes, including poor team performance and low financial profitability. I explain this prevalence by studying and testing two selection channels. In the exogenous selection channel, I experimentally examine partner choice in strategic settings involving collaboration, competition, and fairness. I find that, regardless of their own narcissism, individuals prefer less narcissistic partners across all games. The main mechanism is consistent with subjects anticipating that matching with narcissists would systematically imply lower payoffs across games, making avoidance of such partners payoff-maximizing. In the endogenous selection channel, I study self-selection into competitive environments. While I find no ex-ante performance differences across narcissism levels, individuals who are both high in ability and high in narcissism are significantly more likely to enter publicly observable competitions, reflecting strategic self-selection into ego-enhancing environments. As a result, their disproportionately large share of wins in publicly observable environments therefore arises from differential entry rather than from superior underlying performance.

We develop a theoretical framework to study the fundamental attribution error in hiring: the tendency to over-attribute observed performance to worker ability and under-attribute it to circumstances. In our framework, employers learn how observed performance maps into underlying ability and circumstances directly from data, rather than updating pre-existing knowledge withing a given mental model. This allows us to link the emergence and magnitude of attribution errors to measurable features of the environment, including the statistical properties of the data and the relative predictive power of ability and task difficulty. Heterogeneity in individuals’ costs of processing information further generates systematic differences in the extent of the bias. We therefore move beyond treating the fundamental attribution error as a fixed predisposition by linking it to objective features of the environment, thereby identifying potential margins for policy intervention. We test these predictions in a laboratory hiring experiment.

Firms, schools, and other institutions choose how precisely to measure and report individual performance, even when material stakes are unaffected. We study whether this choice matters by varying the anticipated informativeness of performance feedback in a between-subjects lab experiment, holding material incentives fixed. Participants complete two ego-relevant tasks, a timed arithmetic task and a pattern-recognition task, expecting either highly informative or noisier feedback about their performance. Under highly informative feedback, participants perform significantly worse in the arithmetic task, where time pressure is severe, and show a similar pattern in the pattern-recognition task among those for whom time is binding. This gap is not explained by lower effort: behavioral and self-reported measures show no treatment difference in effort, while informative feedback reduces the efficiency with which effort converts into performance. These results identify self-image concerns as a channel through which the informativeness of feedback systems , not just their content, can shape performance.

I study experimentally the criteria people follow when selecting partners in different economic settings. I advance my prior work on matching and narcissism and I connect it to the Big 5 (Openness, Conscientiousness, Agreeableness, Neuroticism and Extraversion). In particular, I investigate the way participants evaluate relevant information about someone's behavior, what aspect of their personality they consider as more informative, and how these traits predict behavior. I find that participants choose according to the principle of homophily with respect to their scores on the trait conscientiousness and that participants that score high on agreeableness are preferred across all contexts of interaction.