As part of the Seminar of Economics and Management (SEAM), Madison Dell, PhD, will present her study "Choice Architecture in Occupational Choices.”
Madison Dell is a Postdoctoral Researcher at the University of Zurich, affiliated with the Swiss Leading House on the Economics of Education, Firm Behavior, and Training Policies. Her research focuses on postsecondary education, with an emphasis on equitable access, student success, and the connections between education and the workforce, using experimental and quasi-experimental methods. Prior to academia, she worked as a researcher for the state of Tennessee (USA) in both its higher education coordinating board and its system of community and technical colleges, shaping her policy-relevant research agenda. She earned a Ph.D. in Economics of Education and M.A. in Economics from Stanford University.
Here is the abstract of the study:
“We study how choice architecture in online platforms shapes high-stakes occupational choices through two behavioral mechanisms: motivated reasoning and cognitive load. Using detailed process data from a large online job board and exploiting a quasi-experimental setting, we leverage two sources of exogenous variation in the presentation of occupation recommendations. First, we use random variation in the rank order of equally well-matched occupations to study the effects of motivated reasoning. Our results show that rank order strongly increases the level of users’ engagement on the platform and, consequently, the number of occupations to which they apply. Second, we exploit a redesign that transformed the occupation recommendations from a static, text-heavy list into an interactive and visually enriched presentation. The redesign was neither announced nor anticipated, which allows for causal interpretation. We find that this small redesign significantly increases the number of occupations to which users apply, supporting our hypothesis that it reduces cognitive load, leading to increased use of a watch list that keeps more occupations in jobseekers’ memory. Our findings provide large-scale field evidence showing that even small changes in platform design significantly and strongly shape consequential career choices.”
The presentation will take place from 13:00-14:00 in room Q3.245. Interested researchers are kindly invited to attend.
