Lina Maria Lozano (NYU-AD)

Seminar series “CLOSER, but not quite” – Attribution Narratives of Failure and Success in Strategic Settings

Venue: Campus Luigi Einaudi, room 3 D1 01

Abstract: During our educational and professional lives, we face failures and successes that we need to justify to ourselves and others. In most cases, failure and success are the results of an unknown combination of both internal factors (i.e., own ability and exerted effort) and external factors that are outside one’s control (i.e., others or luck). The evidence suggests that when people attribute the causes of failure and success, they often exhibit a “self-attribution bias” -attribute success to their merit and failure to external sources- to maintain self-esteem. In this project, we study an additional reason for the self-attribution bias, a strategic one. We use an online experiment to test how individuals attribute noisy feedback when the source of the outcome can be due to their ability or someone else’s ability. Moreover, following recent evidence on gender differences in attribution biases, we also test whether men and women use different failure and success justifications and study the consequences of it in a hiring context. Understanding the nature and economic consequences of gender differences in attribution of failures/successes is crucial, as it could be one of the causes of the observed gender gaps in the labor market such as the under-representation of women in top-level positions.