Experimental Design
The experiment involves randomizing teams at a manufacturing firm in India into one of two groups. In status quo, workers at this firm are primarily hired through referrals that are allocated to incumbent workers by team leaders based on their discretion. As part of this experiment, teams in the treatment group will have referral opportunities be given randomly within the set of lower caste incumbent workers, while teams in the control group will have referral opportunities be given to a randomly selected worker regardless of their caste. These teams are organized by task type within lines and shifts, and treatment status will be stratified by task type, team size, and baseline share of lower caste workers.
Edit: following the endline with the firm's workers, I conducted a lab-in-field experiment, wherein teams of workers were asked to work on a group task involving cutting strips of fabric that were then tied together to produce ropes. Each team had one lower caste and two upper caste workers. After one round of the task, the teams were allocated into three different groups that determined how the teams grew from three to four members. In the first group, mimicking the intervention in the firm, the fourth member was a referral of the incumbent lower caste worker on the team. In the second group, the fourth member was a referral of a randomly selected incumbent upper caste member of the team. In the third group, the fourth member was not a referral of any of the incumbent workers. This group was informed that the fourth worker is being added to balance the team by caste. Following this, the workers performed the same task in another session. At the end of the second session, the workers complete an endline survey and play a symbol matching game, designed to assess their coordination with each other.