"Assume that you are a manager who needs to recruit a few employees from a rather big set of applicants. Typically, to facilitate the process, you would probably define some threshold criteria that applicants need to meet in order to follow through to the next stage, or even get accepted. The idea to use threshold criteria is rather intuitive and for a good reason – in the absence of noise, which may distort the information regarding applicants, threshold criteria are an optimal screening strategy. This is a simple mathematical fact.
However, it appears that the introduction of a completely unbiased noise, that indeed distorts the manager’s available information, can actually lead to cases where threshold criteria perform rather poorly as screening strategies. In other words, once some noise enters the process, the optimal screening strategy needs to be adjusted accordingly.
This understanding leads to the phenomenon which we refer to as “a bias of screening...." read more>>
