Speaker：Shaoda Wang

Time: September 5, 2019, from 11:00 a.m. to 12:00 a.m.

Location: Conference Room 734, Mingde Main Building

Introduction:Shaoda Wang is an applied economist based at the University of Chicago, where he is currently a postdoctoral scholar at the Department of Economics, and will be joining the Harris School of Public Policy as an assistant professor in July 2021. His research interests include development economics, environmental economics, and political economy. Prior to Chicago, he received his BA from Peking University in 2014, and PhD from UC Berkeley in 2019.

Summary of Content：Subjective performance evaluation is widely used by firms and governments to provide work incentives. However, delegating evaluation power to senior leadership could induce influence activities: agents might devote much efforts to please their supervisors, rather than focusing on productive tasks that benefit their organizations. We conduct a large-scale randomized field experiment among Chinese local government employees and provide the first rigorous empirical evidence on the existence and implications of influence activities. We find that state employees are able to impose evaluator-specific influence to affect evaluation outcomes, and that this process could be partly observed by their co-workers. Furthermore, introducing uncertainty in the identity of the evaluator, which discourages evaluator-specific influence activities, can significantly improve the work performance of state employees.

School of Applied Economics, Renmin University of China