UCL School of Management is delighted to welcome Professor Elad Sherf, UNC Chapel Hill,to host a research seminar discussing ‘The Fairness and Adoption of Threshold Lotteries in Organizational Selection Processes’.

Abstract

Organizations employ processes to select among options (e.g., hiring or funding decisions). Frequently, they employ meritocratic processes, requiring selections based on merit or quality maximization. Although effective and efficient in the ideal form and thus considered fair, meritocratic processes often fail to achieve their intended outcomes due to biases rooted in prejudice or preference of the familiar. At the same time, an alternate process known to eliminate biases—selection by random chance—is uncommonly used due to concerns about the quality of chosen options. Consequently, across contexts such as education, academic grants, and leadership selection, scholars advocate for a hybrid alternative: threshold lottery processes, random selection following a quality screening stage, which proponents argue reduce bias but maintain quality. Even assuming threshold lotteries are indeed advantageous, their adoption is unlikely if potential adopters judge them as less fair than incumbent meritocratic processes. Unfortunately, despite extensive literature on the fairness of selection processes, we lack theory about when and why threshold lotteries are judged as fair. Drawing on philosophical discussions on the fairness of random selections, we theorize that the fairness and adoption of a selection process are shaped by indeterminacy beliefs—the belief that in a selection context, it is always possible to differentiate options based on quality. Across nine studies we find that when indeterminacy beliefs are higher, threshold lottery processes are judged as fair as meritocratic processes and are adopted more frequently. Our theory contributes to discussions of organizational fairness and the persistence of meritocratic systems.