"Childbearing Age and Gender Discrimination in Hiring Decisions: A Large-Scale Field Experiment" (with Shi Wei (ShanghaiTech), Li Lunzheng (SZU), Xu Zhibo (SZU)).
https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=4199754
We conduct a large-scale field experiment in China to investigate the effect of being of childbearing age on gender discrimination in the labor market. We send 35,713 fictitious resumes to real job postings on a major Chinese online recruitment platform for jobs in four leading cities, Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou, and Shenzhen, which vary in the length of maternity leave. We send applications for positions advertised in the male-dominated field of information technology (IT), the female-dominated field of accounting (ACC), and the mixed-gender field of human resources (HR). We systematically vary the age and gender of the job applicants and record callbacks for interviews. To accurately mimic the job application process in the Chinese labor market, we do not disclose the applicants’ family status. We find that women of childbearing age are subject to discrimination in the field of IT, a problem that also exists in HR and ACC, particularly in Beijing and Shanghai. There is no obvious discrimination against women of childbearing age in Guangzhou or Shenzhen, where maternity leave is longer. In the aggregate, the evidence indicates that women of childbearing age face statistical discrimination that prevents them from obtaining equal employment opportunities.
"Igniting Deliberation in High Stake Decisions: A Field Study" (with Andreas Hefti (Zurich), Peiyao Shen (ShanghaiTech))
https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3797548
We conduct a large scale randomized field experiment to study whether providing recipients – 42,454 Chinese households in a rural area – with information on the costs of a real decision they make can help to improve the quality of their choices. The decisions are of high financial impact, as the objects of deliberation – air conditioners – have upfront prices exceeding the average monthly salary of a household. Besides providing nominal cost information, we conduct two additional treatments, where we either present the same information by making the real opportunity costs salient, or by administering the information via a quiz. The former aims at facilitating the comparison of effective costs, while the latter aims at enhancing attention and cognitive involvement. We find that providing cost information substantially affects the choices made, and reduces the decision mistakes, in particular in the two additional treatments.
"Crowding Out in the Labor Market: A Prosocial Setting is Necessary (with Tanjim Hossain (University of Toronto))
(Management Science, 60(5), 1148-1160)
pubsonline.informs.org/doi/abs/10.1287/mnsc.2013.1807
Recent studies, mostly from prosocial settings, suggest that monetary rewards may crowd out effort exertion by economic agents. We design a field experiment with data entry workers to investigate the extent of such crowding-out effects in a labor market. Using simple variations in the job description of a task, we induce a natural work setting under the work frame and emphasize social preference under the social frame. We find that crowding out of labor participation critically depends on framing—whereas small monetary rewards reduce the participation rate under the social frame, the participation rate is nondecreasing in the wage rate under the work frame. Moreover, among the workers who participate in the task, those who receive a positive wage perform a considerably higher amount of work than those who are paid zero wage under either frame. Thus, there is weak evidence of crowding out only when the task is explicitly given a prosocial flavor and not under a regular work setting. Furthermore, emphasizing social preference in the labor market in such a way reduces the overall labor supply and seems to have an adverse effect on the quality of work.
How does language affect decision-making in social interactions and decision biases?
(Journal of Economic Psychology, 2017, Vol. 61, 15-28)
This paper investigates how communication in a particular language affects decision-making in social interactions and risk preferences. We test two competing hypotheses: the cognitive accessibility hypothesis, and the expectation-based hypothesis. The cognitive accessibility hypothesis argues that communication in a particular language will activate the underlying cultural frame and affect behavior. The expectation-based hypothesis argues that different languages will induce different expectations regarding the choices of others and affect behavior. We test these two hypotheses using an extensive range of behaviors in a set of incentivized experiments with bilingual subjects in Chinese and English. We find that the subjects are more prosocial in strategic interaction games (trust games) when the experiments are conducted in Chinese. However, no treatment effects are observed in the individual choice games on social preference. The results are more in line with the expectation-based hypothesis.
Asymmetric Memory Recall of Positive and Negative Events in Social Interactions
[Experimental Economics, 2013, Volume 16, Issue 3, pp 248-262]
Previous studies have suggested that negative emotion can enhance memory accuracy. However, they were not conducted in the context of social interactions involving moral sentiments. Based on the present study, we find that in such a context, individuals’ memory recall accuracy depends on the kindness of acts and who performed them, and negative emotion may lower memory accuracy. A victim of an unkind act is more likely to forget than someone who benefited from a kind act. This result supports the hypothesis that individuals may strategically manipulate their memory by forgetting an unpleasant experience. We also find that individuals who committed an unkind act tend to perceive it as less unkind as time moves on. They also tend to believe that a higher percentage of players have also committed the unkind act. Overall, the results support the hypothesis that individuals strategically manipulate their memory and beliefs to maintain self-esteem or feel less guilty.
Preference towards Control in Risk Taking: Control, No Control, or Randomize?
[Journal of Risk and Uncertainty August 2011, Volume 43, Issue 1, pp 39-63]
This paper experimentally investigates preference towards different methods of control in risk taking. Participants are asked to choose between different ways for choosing which numbers to bet on for a gamble. They can choose the numbers themselves (control), let the experimenter choose (no control), or randomize. Classical economic theories predict indifference among the three methods. We found that participants exhibit strict preference for control, preference for no control, and preference for randomization. These preferences are robust as participants are willing to pay a small amount of money to implement their preferred method. Most participants believe that the winning probability under different methods is the same. This result contributes to the literature by clarifying that for most participants who exhibit preference for control, their preference is not due to illusion of control, but by source preference. We also found that preference towards control affects investment amount. Participants invest less in the risky gamble when they are not offered their preferred method.
Jury Voting without Objective Probability
(with Toru Suzuki, University Technology Sydney)
[Social Choice and Welfare, 2016, 46(2), 389-406]
Unlike in the standard jury voting experiment, the voting environment in practice has no explicit signal structure. Voters then need to conceptualize the information structure in order to update their beliefs based on “pivotal reasoning”. This paper investigates whether voters can play a strategic voting under a “detail-free” environment. We obtain non-parametric predictions in terms of the differences in voting behaviors under majority and unanimity rule. Our experimental results suggest that voters can still play the strategic voting as in the existing experiments.
Source preference and ambiguity aversion: models and evidence from behavioral and neuroimaging experiments
[Soo Hong Chew, King King Li, Robin Chark, Songfa Zhong (2008), Source preference and ambiguity aversion: models and evidence from behavioral and neuroimaging experiments, in Daniel Houser, Kevin McCabe (ed.) Neuroeconomics (Advances in Health Economics and Health Services Research, Volume 20), Emerald Group Publishing Limited, pp.179-201]
This experimental economics study using brain imaging techniques investigates the risk-ambiguity distinction in relation to the source preference hypothesis (Fox & Tversky, 1995) in which identically distributed risks arising from different sources of uncertainty may engender distinct preferences for the same decision maker, contrary to classical economic thinking. The use of brain imaging enables sharper testing of the implications of different models of decision-making including Chew and Sagi's (2008) axiomatization of source preference. Using fMRI, brain activations were observed when subjects make 48 sequential binary choices among even-chance lotteries based on whether the trailing digits of a number of stock prices at market closing would be odd or even. Subsequently, subjects rate familiarity of the stock symbols.Findings – When contrasting brain activation from more familiar sources with those from less familiar ones, regions appearing to be more active include the putamen, medial frontal cortex, and superior temporal gyrus.