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Does working in a gender-atypical occupation reduce individuals’ likelihood of finding a different-sex romantic partner, and do such occupational partnership penalties contribute to occupational gender segregation? To answer this question, we theorized partnership penalties for working in gender-atypical occupations by drawing on insights from evolutionary psychology, social constructivism, and rational choice theory and exploited the stability of occupational pathways in Germany. In Study 1, we analyzed observational data from a national probability sample (N= 1,634,944) to assess whether individuals in gender-atypical occupations were less likely to be partnered than individuals who worked in gender typical occupations. To assess whether the observed partnership gaps found in Study 1 were causally related to the gender typicality of men’s and women’s occupations, we conducted a field experiment on a dating app (N = 6,778). Because the findings from Study 2 suggested that young women and men indeed experienced penalties for working in a gender-atypical occupation (at least when they were not highly attractive), we employed a choice-experimental design in Study 3 (N = 1,250) to assess whether women and men were aware of occupational partnership penalties and showed that anticipating occupational partnership penalties may keep young and highly educated women from working in gender-atypical occupations. Our main conclusion therefore is that that observed penalties and their anticipation seem to be driven by unconscious rather than conscious processes.
Fairness versus efficiency
(2018)
We investigate in a laboratory experiment whether procedural fairness concerns affect how well individuals are able to solve a coordination problem in a two-player Volunteer's Dilemma. Subjects receive external action recommendations, either to volunteer or to abstain from it, in order to facilitate coordination and improve efficiency. We manipulate the fairness of the recommendation procedure by varying the probabilities of receiving the disadvantageous recommendation to volunteer between players. We find evidence that while recommendations improve overall efficiency regardless of their implications for expected payoffs, there are behavioural asymmetries depending on the recommendation: advantageous recommendations are followed less frequently than disadvantageous ones and beliefs about others' actions are more pessimistic in the treatment with recommendations inducing unequal expected payoffs.
Cooperation is — despite not being predicted by game theory — a widely documented aspect of human behaviour in Prisoner’s Dilemma (PD) situations. This article presents a comparison between subjects restricted to playing pure strategies and subjects allowed to play mixed strategies in a one-shot symmetric PD laboratory experiment. Subjects interact with 10 other subjects and take their decisions all at once. Because subjects in the mixed-strategy treatment group are allowed to condition their level of cooperation more precisely on their beliefs about their counterparts’ level of cooperation, we predicted the cooperation rate in the mixed-strategy treatment group to be higher than in the pure-strategy control group. The results of our experiment reject our prediction: even after controlling for beliefs about the other subjects’ level of cooperation, we find that cooperation in the mixed-strategy group is lower than in the pure-strategy group. We also find, however, that subjects in the mixedstrategy group condition their cooperative behaviour more closely on their beliefs than in the pure-strategy group. In the mixed-strategy group, most subjects choose intermediate levels of cooperation.
Cooperation is — despite not being predicted by game theory — a widely documented aspect of human behaviour in Prisoner’s Dilemma (PD) situations. This article presents a comparison between subjects restricted to playing pure strategies and subjects allowed to play mixed strategies in a one-shot symmetric PD laboratory experiment. Subjects interact with 10 other subjects and take their decisions all at once. Because subjects in the mixed-strategy treatment group are allowed to condition their level of cooperation more precisely on their beliefs about their counterparts’ level of cooperation, we predicted the cooperation rate in the mixed-strategy treatment group to be higher than in the pure-strategy control group. The results of our experiment reject our prediction: even after controlling for beliefs about the other subjects’ level of cooperation, we find that cooperation in the mixed-strategy group is lower than in the pure-strategy group. We also find, however, that subjects in the mixedstrategy group condition their cooperative behaviour more closely on their beliefs than in the pure-strategy group. In the mixed-strategy group, most subjects choose intermediate levels of cooperation.