Behavioral Economics: Real-world applications in recruiting and assessment

Date: 

Monday, April 9, 2018, 12:30pm to 1:30pm

Location: 

RCC Seminar Room, 26 Trowbridge St., Cambridge MA

Behavioral economics has been one of the most developed areas of knowledge within the social sciences. Proof of this is the number of Nobel Prize winners in economics that have been awarded to researchers in this area of knowledge in recent years. The practical applications in the real world are countless. In fact, many behavioral economics consulting companies have been established in the last decade.

dpeHowever, the vast majority of these companies are dedicated to working on market and customer issues and some of them, in smaller numbers, to offering solutions to public institutions. There are very few that offer solutions in the world of human resources and even fewer that have focused on providing solutions to existing problems in the field of employee selection and promotion. It is even more difficult when the measures involve group work and not just individual characteristics.

In this talk we want to offer an innovative proposal for the development of optimal equipment in the working environment in which we use the knowledge acquired within the discipline Behavioral Economics to optimize the performance of work teams over and above the personal characteristics of each worker. The hiring decision would be made not by individual characteristics but by how those individual characteristics fit into a workgroup and maximize team performance.

Speaker: David Pascual-Ezama, RCC Fellow, Fulbright Visiting Scholar at MIT Sloan School of Management