Université de Lausanne
Ecole des HEC
Département d'économétrie et d'économie politique

Mercredi 2 avril 2008, 13h00
Extranef, salle 126

Imran RASUL
(University College , London)

Blissful Ignorance?
Evidence From a Natural Experiment on The Effect of Individual Feedback on Performance

Abstract
We present evidence from a natural experiment to identify the causal effect of providing individuals feedback on their past performance, on their subsequent performance. The natural experiment is based on administrative records on graduate students' performance in a leading UK university. We exploit the fact that different departments within the same university have historically different policies over whether feedback is provided to students on their earlier test scores. Such feedback policies are not publicized and we present evidence in line with students being unaware of their department's feedback policy when they enroll. We find the effect of providing feedback is to raise later test scores by .12 standard deviations. We also present evidence, in line with a basic theoretical framework, on how this effect is heterogeneous across students according to their ability, and use the model to rule out that students use feedback to tailor their effort to reach some given threshold in test scores. The results have important implications for the interplay between the provision of feedback and incentive schemes both in the context of higher education, and more generally, in workplace environments.

Web site of the seminar (with paper online): http://www.hec.unil.ch/deep/evenements-english/e-sem-all-2007-08.htm