WiE Brown Bag Seminar - January

Join us for our first session of the WiE Brown Bag Seminar in 2026 featuring Charlotte Cordes, a fifth-year PhD candidate at LMU Munich.

Motivated memory and favoritism

Abstract: 

Favoritism is ubiquitous, despite its negative economic impact and questionable ethics. This project investigates imperfect memory as a cause of favoritism. In an online experiment, managers make incentivized hiring decisions. To causally identify the role of memory in favoritism, I vary whether managers base their choices on workers’ quality or on their recall of that quality. When decisions rely on memory, the hiring gap between favored and nonfavored workers more than doubles from 10 to 21 percentage points. This effect is partly driven by motivated memory distortions: managers remember favored workers as being of higher quality than unfavored ones.

The Women in Economics Brown Bag Seminar Series is an informal, research-focused space designed to support academic exchange among our members. Inspired…