Experimental Design Details
The timing of the Incentivized Resume Rating will be randomized across managers: in particular, Federmanager will be able to tell us whether two or more identifying numbers as described in the “Partner and survey delivery” section belong to the same firm (this is however implausible and very rare as stated by Federmanager). So, for ease the explanation, let us think as the unit of our analysis the firm, which might have one (or more managers) taking part to the survey. Again, we don’t know neither the identity of the manager nor the identity of the firm. So for firm with only one manager responding to the survey, the manager will correspond to the firm itself.
To be noted is that the randomization will be carried out at manager level if we have no firm with multiple answers (more plausible event). Our prior is that we will not have answers from managers belonging to the same firm, as Federmanager has never seen such a case in previous surveys delivered to its subscribers. But if this is not the case for our experiment, we will choose to randomize at the firm level rather than at the manager’s level in order to avoid contamination between managers who receive the early feedback and those who receive the feedback after the IRR.
The treated grous receive the feedback (IAT or general information treatment) before the Incentivized Resume Rating. Managers in the control group will receive the IAT feedback straight after the IRR. We are obliged to reveal to everyone his/her IAT, as the Bocconi Ethics Committee requested us to do so, in order not to annoy the managers in the control group.
There is no decepetion, managers are aware that CVs are fake.
Collaborating with Federmanager, the biggest association of Italian managers, we aim to deliver a first survey in which we will collect managers' Implicit Gender Bias (IAT Gender). The survey will be distributed directly from Federmanager, hence Bocconi researchers will not have access to mail addresses of respondents (but just to anonymized identification numbers), nor any kind of question that would allow any sort of identification of the respondent will be asked (we will ask demographics questions, such as age, gender, education, but will not ask any information about the name of firm they work for).
The data collection of the first survey will last two weeks, starting from end of October.
After ten days (during which the researchers will divide respondents into treatment and control group), the treatment group will receive the communication about own IAT score. After one or three weeks, we will be sending a second (experimental) survey to both treatment and control groups, in which they will be asked to evaluate fake profiles (CVs) of MBA students and will ask to give an evaluation on a Likert Scale for the extent to which they think that profile is "promising to become a good manager".
Outcomes (dependent variables) will be the score (Likert from 1 to 10) of each profile evaluated by respondents. Independent variables will range to the treatment variable (IAT score revealed or not), IAT score, managers' demographics, profile's characteristics (gender, age, field of specialization, ..).
In order to construct realistic CVs of Master's student, we will be collaborating together with Bocconi SDA. MBA students will be asked whether they are interested in participating to this project and, in case, to provide us their CVs. We would scrape their CV and construct fake profiles on basis of true CVs. Characteristics in fake profiles are randomized, as done in Factorial Survey Analysis.
There will be no participant remuneration. The incentive we provide is twofold:
1. we ask managers to contribute to identify the "most promising managers of the future" for a presentation of the Association to Master students. We will contact those students that mostly resemble the preferred fake profiles and ask them whether they would be interested in participating in an event in which Federmanager presents itself.
2. Upon student consent, we will ask managers if they are willing to receive Master students' CVs that mostly resemble their own preferred characteristics.