‘Overattention’ to first-hand experience in hiring decisions: Evidence from professional basketball

We provide evidence from a real-world, high-stakes, and empirically-advantageous labor market — the market for NBA basketball players — that employers’ hiring decisions rely too heavily on first-hand experiences with job candidates. Specifically, we find that employers are biased in favor of acquiring players with better-than-usual performances when the employer’s team was playing or preparing to play the player’s original team, with performance information receiving approximately 1.8 times more weight in hiring decisions if it is conveyed through such first-hand experiences. These effects are not predicted by leading behavioral learning theories used to explain similar effects observed in other domains. Instead, our findings point to overattention as a key mechanism through which first-hand experience biases can arise.