Kariyushi Rao
Frankfurt School of Finance & Management
Frankfurt am Main, Germany 60322

Research interests: Causal reasoning, responsibility attribution, organizational
learning, social learning strategies, social networks

EDUCATION

The University of Chicago                                                                                         Chicago, IL
Doctor of Philosophy in Behavioral Science                                                               March 2021

  • Dissertation area: Behavioral Science (support area: Organizations and Markets)
  • Dissertation: “Collective response to scarcity: How the resource environment
    shapes social networks” (Rao, Kariyushi. The University of Chicago, ProQuest
    Dissertations Publishing, 2021. 28414556) [GitHub] [Dissertation Manuscript]
  • Advisors: Reid Hastie (Chair), Richard Thaler, Ronald S. Burt, Emir Kamenica, John Levi Martin, Michael Gibbs

Master of Science in Computer Science                                                               December 2016

  • Focus: Software Engineering
  • Languages: Java, Python, Ruby (on Rails), R, SQL, PHP, HTML, JavaScript, CSS

Master of Business Administration                                                                       December 2012

  • Concentrations: Organizational Behavior, Strategic Management, Economics, Entrepreneurship
  • Honors & awards: Dean’s Award of Distinction (2012)

Stanford University – Center for Professional Development                         Palo Alto, CA
Stanford Certified Project Manager (SCPM)                                                      November 2009

Bowdoin College                                                                                                  Brunswick, ME
Bachelor of Arts                                                                                                               May 2007

  • Majors: Government, Romance Languages (Minor: Asian Studies)

ACADEMIC POSITIONS

Frankfurt School of Finance & Management                                        Frankfurt, Germany
Assistant Professor of Organizational Behavior                                         July 2024 – Present

Warwick Business School                                                                                    Coventry, UK
Houlden Postdoctoral Teaching & Research Fellow,                    September 2022 – June 2024
Behavioural Science Group

The University of Chicago Booth School of Business                                          Chicago, IL
Graduate Research & Teaching Assistant,                                     May 2016 – September 2022
Behavioral Science Department

Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University                          Evanston, IL
Postdoctoral Scholar, Center for Science of Science and                         March–October 2021
Innovation

PUBLICATIONS

Rao, Kariyushi. (2025). The effects of competition and scarcity on interpersonal communication in organizations.  Organization Science. https://doi.org/10.1287/orsc.2023.18288.
Links: [OSF] [GitHub] [Pre-Publication Copy Editor’s Draft]
Description: When an organization’s environment changes, communication between its members is essential for a timely response. However, past observational studies suggest that communication declines when an organization is exposed to an adverse environmental event. To understand why this might happen, I examine the effects of competition and scarcity—two common features of adverse events—on information sharing and seeking— the microfoundations of organizational communication. In the present study, interactive groups of experimental participants play a novel n-armed bandit game where they work as salespeople for companies that offer a lot of different products (The Sales Game). Some groups experience stable customer demand, while others are exposed to negative or positive demand shifts. Participants earn variable rewards based on their individual performance, and competition is induced in half of the groups through a small bonus based on relative performance. Participants can choose to exchange information with their peers throughout the task. When participants freely exchange information, the increase in individual performance-based rewards is larger than the tiny competitive bonus. But, participants exposed to this competition share information significantly less often than those who are not. This produces a pattern of communication network contraction consistent with prior observational studies of organizations exposed to adverse events. In contrast to prior research, scarcity (negative demand shifts) has no effect on information exchange. These findings advance our understanding of the relationship between competition, scarcity, and interpersonal communication in organizations. They also have important implications for the design of incentive schemes in modern firms.

Rao, Kariyushi, and Hastie, Reid. (2023). Predicting outcomes in a sequence of
binary events: Belief updating and gambler’s fallacy reasoning.  Cognitive
Science, 47: e13211. http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/cogs.13211
Links: [OSF] [GitHub] [Supplementary Material]
Description: Previous investigations of the hot hand and the gambler’s fallacies
conflated qualitative descriptions of an outcome-generating process with beliefs about
the base rate at which that process produces different outcomes. The present research distinguishes between beliefs about the causal generator versus beliefs about the base
rate. In six behavioral studies, we manipulate participants’ beliefs about the base rate of
three processes: a random mechanical device, an intentional agent, and a market. We
find that hot hand patterns arise when the base rate is uncertain, while gambler’s fallacy patterns only (partially) appear when people hold strong prior beliefs about the base
rate, and the data generating process is described as a random mechanical device.

WORKING PAPERS

Rao, Kariyushi. (In Preparation). Deconstructing human algorithms for search in
complex environments with opportunities for social learning.
Links: [GitHub]
Description: Extant research suggests that people employ uncertainty-driven exploration strategies when searching for the best option in an uncertain environment. But, most of this research employs simplistic experimental paradigms with small choice sets and no opportunities for social learning. The present research examines the types of strategies people engage when confronted with more realistically complex conditions, including a large number of options and opportunities to learn vicariously from others. The results of the present research suggest that people’s search strategies under these conditions are better characterized by uncertainty avoidance than by uncertainty reduction.

WORKS IN PROGRESS

Rao, Kariyushi. (In Progress).  An evidence-based model of human processes for updating beliefs about variance.
Description: Models of human choice in situations that require the chooser to learn the mean of two or more distributions usually incorporate assumptions about the way people update their beliefs about the variance of that distribution.  Few (if any) of these assumptions are based on direct evidence.  Rather than asking people directly for their beliefs about a distribution’s mean and variance, these beliefs are inferred from people’s choices.  In many cases, these inferences are quite tenuous.  The present research project addresses this issue by repeatedly eliciting people’s beliefs about both the mean and variance of (Gaussian) distributions as they sequentially observe samples from those distributions.  Beliefs are elicited using several validated methods, to isolate any influence of the elicitation  methods themselves on people’s responses.  People’s qualitative descriptions of their beliefs and learning processes, as well as their attitudes toward the elicitation methods they confront, are also collected.  The goal is to develop a coherent, comprehensive, description of the way(s) people update their beliefs about the variance of a distribution.   This description will then be contrasted with state-of-the-art belief-updating models to identify discrepancies between modelers’ assumptions and actual human behavior.

TEACHING 

  • Frankfurt School of Finance & Management, Undergraduate and EMBA Programs (Autumn 2024 – Present): Getting Things Done: Strategy Implementation and Resilient & Sustainable Operations, Strategy & Organization
  • The University of Chicago Masters Program in Computer Science (Winter 2022–
    Present): Applied Software Engineering, Human-Computer Interaction, Introduction to Software Engineering
  • The University of Chicago Booth School of Business, Full-Time, Part-Time, and
    Executive MBA Programs (Winter 2014 – Autumn 2024): Effective Management of Groups and Teams, Leadership Capital, Managerial Decision Making, Managing the Workplace, New Venture Strategy, Organizations and Incentives, Power and Influence in Organizations, Strategies and Processes of Negotiation, Strategic Leadership
  • Warwick Business School, University of Warwick, undergraduate, masters, and doctoral programs (Autumn 2022 – June 2024): Big Data Analytics, Behavioural Finance & Big Data, Business Statistics, Data Driven Decision Making, Machine Learning and Data Analytics
  • The College at the University of Chicago (Winter 2022): Managing in Organizations
  • Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University, Full-Time MBA
    Program (Autumn 2020): Social Dynamics and Network Analysis
  • The University of Chicago Harris School of Public Policy, Double Executive
    Masters in Health Policy (Spring 2019): Leadership, Negotiation, and Advocacy in
    Health Policy: Strategies and Tactics

AWARDS & GRANTS

Outstanding TA Award, EXP-27 Cohort, The University of Chicago Booth School
of Business Executive MBA Program.  June 2022.

Outstanding TA Award, XP-91 Cohort, The University of Chicago Booth School
of Business Executive MBA Program.  June 2022.

Co-PI, “DOCTORAL DISSERTATION RESEARCH IN DRMS Collective Response to
Scarcity: How the Resource Environment Shapes Social Networks”, National Science Foundation (NSF) Award #2018173, $39,191, 08/2020 – 07/2021.

PI, “Theory-of-Mind Reasoning in P-Beauty Contests: How Knowledge of
Counterparts’ Experience and Expertise Matters,” Center for Decision Research,
The University of Chicago Booth School of Business, $3,000.  Winter 2018.

PRESENTATIONS & INVITED TALKS

“Deconstructing human algorithms for search in complex environments with opportunities for social learning,” The Society for Judgment and Decision Making Conference. New York, NY. November, 2024.

“Design and Execution of Interactive Web Application-Based Group Experiments,” INSNA/
Sunbelt Conference. Edinburgh, Scotland. June 2024.

“Deconstructing human algorithms for search in complex environments with opportunities
for social learning,” Behavioral Decision Research in Management. Chicago, IL. June, 2024.

“Confronting Challenges in the Design and Execution of Interactive Online Experiments,”
Experimental Organization Science (EOS)  Masterclass. October, 2023.

“How scarcity affects the emergence and evolution of communication networks among strategic human decision-makers,” INSNA/Sunbelt Conference.  Portland, OR.  June, 2023.

“Do people undervalue random samples of the environment? Comparing people’s appetite for random versus social side observations in an explore-exploit task,” SOD Seminar.  Odense, Denmark.  April, 2023.

“The Sales Game: A multiplayer multi-armed bandit game,” Collaboratorium, Aarhus University.  Aarhus, Denmark.  February, 2023.

“Collective response to scarcity: How the resource environment shapes social
networks,” Theoretical Organizational Models (TOM) Society Annual Meeting.
Rome, Italy.  June, 2022.

“Predicting outcomes in a sequence of binary events: A belief-updating account of
hot hand and gamblers fallacy judgment patterns,” The Society for Judgment and
Decision Making Conference.  Montréal, QC, Canada.  November, 2019.

“Women at Work: Challenges and Opportunities,” Power of Women Inaugural
Meeting.  AllianceBernstein.  Chicago, IL.  June, 2018.

SERVICE

  • Ad Hoc Reviewer
    • Organization Science
    • Management Science
    • Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology
    • Journal of Experimental Child Psychology
    • Peer Community In
  • Member, Editorial Board (Special Issue, 2024)
    • Special Issue on Analytical Creativity, Information Systems Research
  • Member, PhD Brown Bag Organizing Committee, Theoretical Organizational Models
    (TOM) Society (2022-2025)

SKILLS

  • Statistical analysis languages and software: R, HLM, MMWS, Stata, SPSS
  • Web-based experimental design languages, platforms, and software: oTree,
    Django, psiTurk, HTML, JavaScript, CSS, Ruby (on Rails), Qualtrics, Mechanical
    Turk, Heroku, AWS
  • Programming languages: Java, Python, SQL
  • Human languages: Intermediate French (conversation, reading), intermediate
    Spanish (conversation, reading), native English

PATENTS

Rao, Kariyushi.  Methods, Systems and Media for Presenting Commerce Information Related to Video Content. October 15, 2015. US Patent Publication No. US20150296250. European Patent Publication No. EP3129940. Chinese Patent Publication No. CN106462874. PCT Patent Publication No. WO2015157714.

PROFESSIONAL EXPERIENCE

Leading Behavior                                                                                                     London, UK
Partner, Staff Research Scientist                                                      September 2022 – Present

Google, Inc.                                  Mountain View, CA (2007-08) / Chicago, IL (2008-2015)
The ZOO, Global Creative Services Team                                                                  2011 – 2015

  • Account Director (January 2014 – April 2015): Developed and implemented large-scale, global advertising and marketing programs (min $2M investment) for Google’s
    top clients.
  • Interactive Project Manager / Producer (October 2011 – February 2014): Led
    development and launch of large-scale advertising programs and custom
    mobile/web platforms (min $1.5M client investment).

Global Learning and Development                                                                            2013 – 2015

  • (Volunteer) Global Program Manager: Managed global project management training program (100+ volunteer trainers, 120+ sessions a year), developed curriculum, and designed and delivered custom programs.

Affiliate Network                                                                                                          2008 – 2011

  • Business Strategist (May 2010 – October 2011): Managed team of 10 offshore
    contractors. Streamlined key business processes, and developed actionable business intelligence tools.
  • Publisher Support Associate (December 2008 – June 2010): Managed client-facing
    help center, authored technical articles, delivered reactive and proactive support to
    site-owners and merchants.

People Operations                                                                                                      2007 – 2008

  • HR Business Partner Rotational Associate (May 2008 – December 2008): Led human resources analytics and staffing programs and projects. Led global overhaul of
    engineering job ladders.
  • People Programs Rotational Associate (July 2007 – May 2008): Managed hiring
    process and advised senior executives on hiring decisions.