Bio

Rajshri Jayaraman
Associate Professor of Economics and Faculty Lead of the Full-time MBA Program, ESMT Berlin

Prof. Jayaraman has a PhD from Cornell University and worked at the Center for Economic Studies at the University of Munich prior to joining ESMT in 2007. She is a development economist whose research has focused broadly on the role of incentives and social preferences on the decisions and performance of students, workers, and consumers. Her recent empirical work has examined the effect of incentive pay on worker productivity; school feeding programs on student outcomes; and defaults on charitable donations. In collaboration with theorists, she has also worked on the identification of peer effects in social interactions models. At present, she is working on a series of projects concerning immigration, with a focus on Germany’s recent refugee influx. Her research has been published in leading economics journals including the American Economic Review, and the Journal of Political Economy.

Prof. Jayaraman is currently serving as the faculty lead for the ESMT MBA program. She teaches Econometrics in the Masters of Management program and Data Analytics in the MBA and EMBA programs. She has been on ESMT’s Honor Roll for Teaching Excellence for many years. She has also taught development economics at the undergraduate and graduate level. She is a regular participant in conferences and panel discussions on evidence based policy design.

Abstract

In a natural field experiment with 900+ subjects in 300+ teams, we study the effects of choosing team members versus ideas on entrepreneurial team performance. We use a two-by-two design in which subjects are randomly assigned to one of four treatments in which they (i) choose their own team but not the idea they pursue; (ii) choose their own idea but not their team; (iii) choose both their team and the idea to pursue; or (iv) choose neither their team nor the idea. We find that teams who choose their own idea but not their members perform consistently better than those in the remaining treatments. We then explore a number of different channels that can account for this finding.

For more information about Prof. Jayaraman, please visit this website.