Diversity and Team Selection

Date & Time: Los Angeles (9 am), Cincinnati (12 pm), Bath (5 pm), Munich (6 pm), Beijing (February 23, 1 am), Singapore (February 23, 1 am), Sydney (February 23, 4 am)

Paan Jindapon will present the paper titled "Diversity and Team Selection" (joint work with Tigran Melkonyan).

This talk is part of the Global Seminar on Contests & Conflict, an online seminar series with researchers from across the world. You can sign up to the Global Network to get information and invitations (including the Zoom Link for each event) about the Global Seminar here: Max-Planck-Institut für Steuerrecht und Öffentliche Finanzen: Global Seminar on Contests & Conflict (mpg.de).

You can directly access the event here: 

Zoom

Abstract of the Paper:
We analyze a team contest where team managers strategically select compositions of their teams before knowing the type of members that will be more productive in the ensuing competition. The paper fully characterizes the subgame perfect equilibrium of the game and relates the equilibrium behavior to the degree of complementarity between investments of team members and managers' beliefs about the identity of the more productive type. When the degree of complementarity is low, a diverse team provides a ``strategic hedge'' against the possibility of ending up with a team comprised solely of relatively unproductive members. A bias in the managers' beliefs may lead to an equilibrium in which a team member type is left out of the competition. We show that a contest organizer can use type-dependent incentives to counteract such a bias and promote diversity within each team. 

Chair: Dan Kovenock, Co-Chair: Iryna Topolyan