Dan Ariely, co-founder of Irrational Capital, explains his firm's quantitative research linking employee sentiment and treatment to stock market outperformance.
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Ariely: Token female leadership appointments make female employees feel worse
“We found that some companies, when they assign women to high positions, The women within these companies feel worse. Why? Because they take it as an indication that the company doesn't really care about them, that they're only doing things to appeal to PR, lik…”
Insight
Ariely: Compensation fairness drives performance much more than absolute pay levels
“We found that overall level of compensation doesn't matter so much. Fairness, perception of fairness in compensation matters a lot.”
Insight
Ariely: Disparity in appreciation between management and rank-and-file hurts stock performance
“One of the things we find is that it's not about just the overall level of, let's say, feeling appreciated. So we find that feeling appreciated is a very good signal. But it's not just the overall level of being appreciated. It's the difference between how man…”
Assertion Supported
Ariely: The SHE Index systematically underperforms the S&P 500
“Yeah, so it does much worse. Systematically, repeatedly, by big gap.”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Ariely: Low gender sentiment gap delivers 5% annual alpha over S&P
“When we look at our data, and we ask the question of, what is the gap? We said a lot of things are about relativity. So we said, for each company, let's calculate the gap between how men feel and how women feel. Like, you know, do you feel appreciated? What's …”
Insight
Ariely: Increasing pain intensity worsens memory far more than extending duration
“I found out that if you have a period of pain, and you make it longer, you don't actually remember it as worse, but if you change the amplitude, the intensity, you can make it much worse, and the nurses were doing the wrong thing. They were trying to minimize …”