Selective Attention to Performance Measures and Bias in Subjective Performance Evaluations: An Eye-Tracking Study

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The literature provides evidence that subjective performance evaluation judgments are often biased by prior experiences of the evaluating manager. We examine the role of attention in the emergence of experience-induced evaluation bias, focusing on evaluations based on the subjective weighting of performance measures in a balanced scorecard. Using an eye-tracking experiment, we investigate whether evaluation bias arises because managers with different prior experiences with an evaluated employee pay attention to different items in the scorecard. Our results show that while prior experience has a strong effect on evaluation judgments, it does not affect evaluators’ visual attention patterns and neither do attention patterns predict evaluation outcomes. This is consistent with evaluation bias being caused by biased information processing rather than biased attention. We discuss the implications of this finding for management accounting research and practice.