Three experiments on discrimination, inequality, and vulnerability

• Applicant: Dr. Vojtech Bartos
• Subject Area: Economic Policy, Applied Economics
• Term: from 2019 to 2020
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 433837471

Social inequalities and discrimination are prevalent. I propose three studies dealing with these issues.The first study is motivated by the underrepresentation of ethnic minorities in advisory positions. It experimentally examines ethnic discrimination in a market for advice provision. It asks whether and why individuals discriminate against minority advisors, and if exposed to advice from a minority advisor, how do individuals use such advice. We study this in an online experiment. We provide a costly opportunity to watch a video tutorial in which an advisor reveals a strategy to solve a payoff relevant real effort task. We manipulate the skin color of the advisor using video post-production techniques, the amount of information about the advice video, and rewards for the task completion. The second study examines the problem of gender differences in willingness to enter competitive environments. This may contribute to persistent differences in labor market outcomes between men and women. In a novel laboratory experiment, we study realistic versions of tournaments. We non-parametrically estimate the weights of respective underlying motives resulting in the gender gap in behavior. And lastly, we design a tournament that is predicted to result in the lowest gender gap and test it against benchmark tournaments typically used in the literature to inform policy.The aim of the last study is different. It starts from a premise that female migrant domestic workers from the Philippines are often mistreated. It aims to design a behaviorally founded intervention aimed at improving their living and working conditions. It builds on a successful intervention showing that domestic workers who give a small gift and show a photo of their family in the first meeting with their employers report less abuse and prolong their work contracts. We design an incentivized online experiment with representative populations of Hong Kong and Saudi Arabia in which study the effects of the intervention on employers’ behavior towards Filipinas and in implicit attitudes towards Filipinas in general. We separate the respective channels: reduced social distance, increased reciprocity, increased moral cost of causing harm, and a psychological effect of first impressions. The results may inspire low cost interventions, complementary to costly legal changes typically used for workplace conditions regulation.

• DFG Programme: Research Fellowships
• International Connection: USA
• Host: Professor Johannes Haushofer, Ph.D.