Marriage-market considerations play a crucial role for economic outcomes, such as fertility and career-investment choices. As a prominent example, Bursztyn et al. (2017) show that female students may compromise their career prospects to signal traits they deem desirable in the marriage market. Yet, the accuracy of such perceptions remains unclear, due to the absence of incentive-compatible methods to elicit such preferences, as well as a lack of measurement of second-order beliefs in this context. We collaborate with a popular dating app to run a field experiment, allowing us to measure these perceptions and assess their impact on dating- and labor-market outcomes.

We investigate the emergence of meritocratic and egalitarian narratives. Views about the fairness of social outcomes and attitudes towards redistribution are influenced by our interactions with others. We study such interactions in an online experiment by allowing participants to discuss fairness criteria with another subject before making a redistribution decision (allocation in a dictator game). Our goal is to investigate whether interacting with a partner of a similar “type” facilitates the emergence of self-serving narratives and the implementation of more selfish allocations. We also study whether subjects self-select into homogeneous communication environments that facilitate self-persuasion. Our research aims to provide evidence on the effect of social influence on the formation of self-serving beliefs.