You are kindly invited to the Business Administration Seminar of Jeremiah Bentley (Associate Professor of Accounting at the University of Massachusetts Amherst) on “The Effect of Reporting Frequency and Summary Metrics on Subjective Performance Evaluation”. 

The seminar will be held on Friday November 25^th in classroom 0.13 (Sint-Pietersplein 7, ground floor) from 11h30 until 12h30. A sandwich lunch will be provided. Please register before Wednesday November 23^rd through https://webappsx.ugent.be/eventManager/events/seminarJB 

Abstract: Technology has shifted the information environment in firms, (1) allowing for more frequent reporting, and (2) making it easier to explicitly aggregate information through generation of summary metrics. We investigate how these two technology changes affect managers’ subjective evaluations of employee performance. In our experiment, graduate business students evaluate the performance of a hypothetical employee. We manipulate reporting format at three levels: frequent, infrequent, and infrequent with summary metrics. We also manipulate participants’ directional goal (fire vs. promote the employee). We predict and find that participants’ directional goals affect their performance evaluations, consistent with motivated reasoning. We predict that more frequent reporting will exacerbate the effect of directional goals while summary metrics will reduce the effect of directional goals. We find evidence that summary metrics reduce the effect of directional goals, but we fail to find evidence that reporting frequency moderates the effect of directional goals.