• 2025
• Working Paper

We investigate how candidates’ willingness to apply responds to (potential) discrimination and rejection using a simulated labor market. Past work has shown that “blinding” job applications reduces discrimination and increases the rate at which women are hired. Our study asks, how do blinding interventions impact the supply of candidates? Participants in our large online experiment are assigned to the role of either a recruiter or a candidate for a technical coding task. Candidates provide their willingness to apply for the opportunity with a non-blind resume that provides a coarse signal of their skills alongside gender and age, or a blind resume that hides the demographic information. We find that blinding applications increases the rate at which counter-stereotypical candidates apply, revealing an important channel through which blinding interventions can broaden and diversify the pool of talent. Our study goes beyond initial applications to explore the downstream effects of blinding in markets where candidates receive feedback. We ask whether rejections resulting from a blind process have a different impact than non-blind rejections. The effect could go either way: potential discrimination having a particularly discouraging effect on future application behavior, or a blind rejection instead being a stronger signal of quality and therefore inducing greater deterrence. We find support for the latter channel. Blind rejections have a larger impact on future applications than non-blind rejections, particularly for women. As a result, while blinding initially reduces age and gender gaps in willingness to apply, the supply-side benefits of blinding are more muted after a rejection. This causal evidence on the net effects of blinding advances our understanding of a practice that is gaining popularity in the field.

• February 2025
• Case

In April 2009, direct-to-consumer e-commerce muesli brand mymuesli faced a flood of customer questions. The breakfast cereal startup enabled users to order personalized muesli on its website by choosing from 75 organic ingredients for a total of 566 quadrillion potential muesli combinations. mymuesli’s customization process offered a competitive advantage over store-bought brands by allowing consumers to satisfy dietary needs and wants. However, co-founder Hubertus Bessau found customization was a double-edged sword: “People love customization but hate to customize.” While some users knew exactly what they wanted and proceeded through the customization process in minutes, others spent hours, sometimes contacting mymuesli for advice or abandoning the purchase altogether. Bessau wondered if the company could limit customer questions and increase order completion rates and sales by simplifying mymuesli’s customer journey (e.g., through reducing the number of ingredients to choose from and/or by adding pre-packaged muesli options). However, would making changes to mymuesli’s product strategy put the startup’s customization core competency at risk?

• 2025
• Article

When emotions occur in groups, they sometimes impact group behavior in undesired ways. Reducing group’s emotions with emotion regulation interventions can be helpful, but may also be a challenge, because treating every person in the group is often infeasible. One solution is to treat a fraction of a group, and then hope the effect of the treatment will spread to other group members. To test the viability of this option, we designed an experiment to examine the impact of emotion regulation applied to different proportions of groups of six Israeli participants (N = 2659) who shared real-time responses to negative emotions-inducing political stimuli. Before interacting with each other, we treated different proportions of each group with an emotion regulation intervention called cognitive reappraisal, which involved teaching participants to reinterpret events to reduce negative emotions. The results showed that as the proportion of participants who received the treatment increased, there was a reduction in emotions within the non-treated participants. Furthermore, targeting above 40% of participants resulted in reliable group emotional change. Using semantic projection analysis, we validated the contagion of reappraisal language. These findings shed light on the conditions that enable collective emotion regulation.