"Competitive Attitude and Partner Income: Gender Differences in Mating and Cross-Productivity Effects " (with Gahye (Rosalyn) Jeon) (under review)
The study examines how competitiveness impacts future incomes of individuals and their partners in Dutch households. Individual competitiveness is linked to higher incomes for single and partnered women, as well as partnered men, but not for single men. Women's competitiveness positively affects their partner's income, indicating gender differences in competitiveness effects on incomes.
“Sorting by Height: Preferences, Matching, and Income Inequality” (with Pierre-Andre Chiappori, Yu Yang, Junsen Zhang) (In preparation)
We examine how height influences partner search, sorting, and inequality in China’s marriage market. In a randomized online-dating experiment, assignment of male height and income identifies women’s causal substitution patterns: short women require about 47 percent more income per centimeter of reduced male height, medium women around 10 percent, and tall women nearly zero; men’s search is largely unresponsive to women’s traits. We map these revealed preferences into nationally representative data through over-identifying sign restrictions implied by a single-index transferable-utility model. The population evidence shows that positive assortative matching on height severely limits substitution, yielding realized trade-offs of only 13 percent per centimeter for short wives. A fitted "height x height'' surface reveals large income gradients across couples’ joint statures, with households at the upper end earning about 70 percent more than those at the lower end.
"Multiple-Prize All-Pay Auctions with Heterogeneous Players" (with Zhouqiong Chen, Ella Segev, and Zekai Zhang)
We extend prior theoretical work on complete information multi-prize all-pay auctions by incorporating participants with heterogeneous levels of risk aversion and prize valuations. We derive necessary and sufficient conditions for the existence of a unique equilibrium and characterize the equilibrium mixed strategies. Our analysis reveals that, in equilibrium, players with higher valuations or greater risk aversion bid more and achieve higher winning probabilities. Notably, this implies that players with lower valuations but greater risk aversion may bid higher than those with higher valuations. Additionally, while each player’s expected bid decreases as the risk aversion and valuations of other players increase, her own expected bid rises with her individual risk aversion and valuation. These results provide insights into the influence of competitive dynamics on affirmative action policies in academia and the practice of segregating sexes in sports, highlighting how risk attitudes can shape participation and outcomes in competitive contexts.