Research

I enjoy doing research that has both academic and practical relevance. My main reseach tools are behavioral and experimental. My main research topics are Socially Responsible Operations (Ethical Sourcing, Social Auditing, Supplier Training) and Nonprofit Operations (Volunteer Management).

Working Papers

• Selection, Payment, and Information Assessment in Social Audits: A Behavioral Experiment with León Valdés.
  • Major Revision invited at Manufacturing & Service Operations Management.
  • We designed and ran an incentivized laboratory experiment to establish the causal relationship between hiring schemes and social auditor decisions. Through it, we studied how auditors process information, form beliefs, and make decisions influenced by profit motives and concerns for affected workers and clients. We find that auditors behave more leniently, driven by economic and reciprocal concerns, not when the suppliers only pay them but when they both pay and choose them.

Work in Progress

• Reference-dependent effects in volunteering: Expected vs. experienced effort with León Valdés and Mahyar Eftekhar. In progress.
  • We seek to examine how an experienced mismatch between expected and actual effort in a task affects people’s perception of the task and their decision to engage in it again. We aim to compare this between a commercial and a volunteering setting in an incentivized experiment to understand the rational and behavioral drivers behind people’s reactions in both contexts.
• On the joint use of auditing and training to motivate supplier social responsibility with León Valdés. In progress.
  • We consider the differential impacts of a buying company’s reliance on auditing versus training their suppliers on their suppliers’ decision to either actually improve their SR state or hide their true state via a game-theoretic model. Our preliminary results suggest that although auditing can backfire, training does not.
• Increasing Teacher’s Engagement in an Educational App in Rwanda with León Valdés and Mahyar Eftekhar. In progress.
  • We have partnered with an educational nonprofit based in the United States that aims to address children’s illiteracy problem in developing countries like Rwanda, where primary teachers have scarce access to books adequate to their culture and native language. We are currently getting access to our field partner data and aim to design a field intervention to increase teachers’ engagement with the nonprofit’s application, using it to read more often with their students.