Standard-Nutzungsbedingungen:Die Dokumente auf EconStor dürfen zu eigenen wissenschaftlichen Zwecken und zum Privatgebrauch gespeichert und kopiert werden.Sie dürfen die Dokumente nicht für öffentliche oder kommerzielle Zwecke vervielfältigen, öffentlich ausstellen, öffentlich zugänglich machen, vertreiben oder anderweitig nutzen.Sofern die Verfasser die Dokumente unter Open-Content-Lizenzen (insbesondere CC-Lizenzen) zur Verfügung gestellt haben sollten, gelten abweichend von diesen Nutzungsbedingungen die in der dort genannten Lizenz gewährten Nutzungsrechte. Terms of use: Documents in AbstractAffirmative action rules are often implemented to promote women on labor markets. Little is known, however, about how and whether such rules emerge endogenously in groups of potentially affected subjects. We experimentally investigate whether subjects vote for affirmative action rules, against, or abstain. If approved by the vote, a quota rule is implemented that favors women in one treatment, but members of an artificially created group based on random color assignment in another treatment. We find that quota rules based on gender are implemented frequently and do not affect the performance of men and women in a contest.Quota rules based on an arbitrary criterion, however, are less often approved and lead to strong individual reactions of advantaged and disadvantaged group members and to efficiency losses.These results show that the effects of affirmative action policies largely depend on whether these policies are viewed favorably within the affected groups.JEL Codes: C91, C92, D03

By means of a laboratory experiment, Rubin and Sheremeta (Manag Sci 62(4):985-999, 2016), study a bonus-version of the gift-exchange game, including two treatment variations. First they vary whether the effort provided by the agent directly translates into output for the principal, or whether it is distorted by a shock. Second, for the condition with a shock they vary whether the shock is observed by the principal, or not. The authors' main findings are that (1) the introduction of an unobservable shock significantly reduces welfare; and (2) informing the principal about the size of the shock does not restore gift-exchange. In a replication study we largely reproduce finding (1), but we fail to confirm finding (2). Our data suggests that small behavioral differences in the initial rounds lead to a hysteresis effect that is responsible for the differences in results across studies.

No abstract

Standard-Nutzungsbedingungen:Die Dokumente auf EconStor dürfen zu eigenen wissenschaftlichen Zwecken und zum Privatgebrauch gespeichert und kopiert werden.Sie dürfen die Dokumente nicht für öffentliche oder kommerzielle Zwecke vervielfältigen, öffentlich ausstellen, öffentlich zugänglich machen, vertreiben oder anderweitig nutzen.Sofern die Verfasser die Dokumente unter Open-Content-Lizenzen (insbesondere CC-Lizenzen) zur Verfügung gestellt haben sollten, gelten abweichend von diesen Nutzungsbedingungen die in der dort genannten Lizenz gewährten Nutzungsrechte. Terms of use: Documents in AbstractTournament incentives prevail in labor markets, in particular with respect to promotions. Yet, it is often unclear to competitors how many winners there will be or how many applicants compete in the tournament. While it is hard to measure how this uncertainty affects work performance and willingness to compete in the field, it can be studied in a controlled lab experiment. We present a novel experiment where subjects can compete against each other, but where the number of winners is either uncertain (i.e., unknown numbers of winners, but known probabilities) or ambiguous (unknown probabilities for different numbers of winners). We compare these two conditions with a control treatment with a known number of winners. We find that ambiguity induces a significant increase in performance of men, while we observe no change for women. Both men and women increase their willingness to enter competition with uncertainty and ambiguity, but men react slightly more than women. Overall, both effects contribute to men winning the tournament significantly more often than women under uncertainty and ambiguity. Hence, previous experiments on gender differences in competition may have measured a lower bound of differences between men and women.

No abstract

We investigate whether oaths can enforce property rights in a social dilemma and increase welfare. We examine the impact of mandatory and voluntary oaths in a laboratory experiment where individuals can produce wealth, protect accumulated wealth, and take wealth from others. Individuals are more productive when oaths are mandatory compared to a no-oath environment. Subjects' voluntary signing oaths behave similarly to those who sign a mandatory oath. When the oath is voluntary, nonoath-taking individuals engage in nonproductive behavior, negating the positive impact from the voluntary oath. Our results show that altering commitment mechanisms can result in varying welfare levels.

We examine gender differences when eliciting distributional preferences as conducted by the Equality Equivalence Test, which has the ability to classify subjects into preferences types. Preferences are elicited when individuals interact with an individual of the same gender and with an individual of the opposite gender. We find elicited preferences are robust across both in-group (same gender) and out-group (opposite gender) interactions. When analyzing the intensity of benevolence (or malevolence) we find that overall women exhibit more malevolence than men, but there is no gender difference for benevolence. Furthermore, women exhibit a higher level of in-group favoritism than men.