Research
Don't tell anyone I lost to a girl! Gender stereotypes and hiding low performance (with Charles Noussair, Job Market Paper, R&R at Experimental Economics)
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It has been asserted that males incur a psychological cost when they are outperformed by a female competitor. We conduct a laboratory experiment that allows us to measure this cost, for performance in a mathematical task. The experiment is conducted in both the US and China. We find that in our Chinese sample, males are willing to pay more to hide the fact that they have performed worse than another individual than women are, while there is no gender difference in the US. In China, females are willing to pay more to hide poor performance when losing to another female than to a male. In the US, the opposite pattern is observed; women have a greater cost of revealing that they have lost to a man than to another woman. The gender of the counterpart is not a determinant of males' willingness to hide poor performance. An incentivized questionnaire reveals that a stereotype that males would outperform females exists in the Chinese sample, but not among our American participants.
The effect of unrealized (un)kindness in worker-employer relationships
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Whether employees work harder in response to compensation which might have been, but is not actually, realized. For example, do workers work harder, even in bad times, to repay a firm that pays generous bonuses in good times? To study this question, I extend the classical experimental gift-exchange game framework to study the effect of unrealized but intended kindness on employees’ efforts. The question of interest is whether workers' performance and employers' profits are affected if workers are aware of wages they would have received under unrealized business conditions. I investigate a gift-exchange game where firms (employers) make wage offers contingent on two randomly realized states, good or bad, and workers choose an effort level after knowing which state is realized. I manipulate the visibility of wages under the unrealized state. By applying the model in Sebald (2010), unrealized wages are predicted to make a difference because they affect the worker's perception of the employer's kindness, and thus workers have a tendency to reciprocate high unrealized wages in addition to high realized wages. My main finding is that being aware of the unrealized wage affects workers' effort choice and employers' profits if current states are good. The positive marginal effect of current wages is greater if wages in the unrealized bad state are higher. However, unrealized wages do not have an effect if current states are bad.
The role of gender norms in couples' labor division decision (Project in data collection phase)
We investigate how social norms predict couples’ decisions to exit the labor force. When there is an exogenous shock, such as an economic crisis or the birth of a child, who will be the main breadwinner and who will stay at home? This question is extremely important for gender equity under the current global Covid-19 pandemic. Many schools have moved to online instruction and couples must decide who to stay at home to take care of their children. If more females quit the labor force, we can anticipate an increased gender disparity post-crisis. In this paper, we investigate the relationship between social norms regarding gender roles and couples’ behaviors in deciding who stays in the labor force and who quits. We also study whether peer pressure intensifies the effect. We conduct two separate experiments. One experiment is used to elicit the social norm about gender roles using a Krupka and Weber (2013) procedure. We recruit real-life college couples as subjects in the second experiment to perform a stylized task that is based on the labor force quitting decision. The task involves both parties initially performing a real effort task for payment, and at a point in the session, one member of the couple is required to quit the task. Data have already been gathered in China. The data reveal that choosing husbands to work and wives to quit the labor force is considered as the most socially appropriate choice. Accordingly, real-life college couples are more likely to choose the boyfriend to continue the real-effort task for money and the girlfriend to quit the task. Whether their choices are revealed to their peers or not does not play a role in couples’ decisions. This implies that peer pressure does not intensify the effect of the social norm effect. I also plan to run sessions in the US. From the comparison between the Chinese and US data, we can infer how the social environment makes a difference in couples’ decisions.