TY - JOUR
T1 - Now you see it, now you don't
T2 - The vanishing beauty premium
AU - Deryugina, Tatyana
AU - Shurchkov, Olga
N1 - Funding Information:
We are grateful to Kristin Butcher, Phillip Levine, Robin McKnight, Julian Reif, Casey Rothschild, Gauri Kartini Shastri, Akila Weerapana and participants in the Wellesley Economics Department work-in-progress seminar and the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign Finance seminar for valuable comments and discussion. In addition, we would like to acknowledge the generous research support we received from the Harvard Decision Science Laboratory to organize and run our experiment. Shurchkov would like to acknowledge a Harvard Kennedy School's Women and Public Policy Program fellowship for providing the resources that made this research possible. Lizi Chen, Divya Gopinath, Mehrnoush Shahhosseini, and Sizhe Zhang provided excellent research assistance. All remaining errors are our own.
PY - 2015/8/1
Y1 - 2015/8/1
N2 - We design a laboratory experiment to test the extent to which the often-observed "beauty premium" - a positive relationship between attractiveness and wages - is context-specific. Using three realistic worker tasks, we find that the existence of the "beauty premium" indeed depends on the task: while relatively more attractive workers receive higher wage bids in a bargaining task, there is no such premium in either an analytical task or a data entry task. Our analysis shows that the premium in bargaining is driven by statistical discrimination based on biased beliefs about worker performance. We also find that there is substantial learning after worker-specific performance information is revealed, highlighting the importance of accounting for longer-run interactions in studies of discrimination.
AB - We design a laboratory experiment to test the extent to which the often-observed "beauty premium" - a positive relationship between attractiveness and wages - is context-specific. Using three realistic worker tasks, we find that the existence of the "beauty premium" indeed depends on the task: while relatively more attractive workers receive higher wage bids in a bargaining task, there is no such premium in either an analytical task or a data entry task. Our analysis shows that the premium in bargaining is driven by statistical discrimination based on biased beliefs about worker performance. We also find that there is substantial learning after worker-specific performance information is revealed, highlighting the importance of accounting for longer-run interactions in studies of discrimination.
KW - Beauty premium
KW - Discrimination
KW - Economic experiments
KW - Labor markets
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U2 - 10.1016/j.jebo.2015.05.007
DO - 10.1016/j.jebo.2015.05.007
M3 - Article
AN - SCOPUS:84930204137
SN - 0167-2681
VL - 116
SP - 331
EP - 345
JO - Journal of Economic Behavior and Organization
JF - Journal of Economic Behavior and Organization
ER -