Promotions serve two purposes. They ought to provide incentives for employees and to select the best employee for a management position. However, if non-contractible managerial decision rights give rise to private benefits and preference misalignment between managers and the firm, these two...

In a tedious real effort task, agents can choose to receive information about their piece rate that is either low or ten times higher. One third of subjects deliberately decide to forego this instrumental information, revealing a preference for information avoidance. Strikingly, agents who face...

In a tedious real effort task, subjects know that their piece rate is either low or ten times higher. When subjects are informed about their piece rate realization, they adapt their performance. One third of subjects nevertheless forego this instrumental information when given the choice - and...

We conduct a field experiment where we vary both the presence of a gift-exchange wage and the effect of the worker's effort on the manager's payoff. Results indicate a strong complementarity between the initial wage-gift and the agent's ability to "repay the gift". We control for differences in...

Recent behavioral models argue in favor of avoidance of instrumental information. We explore the role of information avoidance in a real-effort setting. Our experiment offers three main results. First, we confirm that preferences for avoidance of instrumental information exist, studying...

Increasing the participation of women in top-level corporate boards is high on the agenda of policymakers. Yet, we know little about director appointment dynamics and the drivers and impediments of women appointments. This study builds on organizational and group-level behavior theories and...

In many economic contexts, an elusive variable of interest is the agent's belief about relevant events, e.g. about other agents' behavior. A growing number of surveys and experiments ask participants to state beliefs explicitly but little is known about the causal relation between beliefs and...

We study whether one reason behind female underrepresentation in leadership is that female leaders are less effective at coordinating followers' actions. Two experiments using coordination games investigate whether female leaders are less successful than males in persuading followers to...