Sandra Maximiano

Gender, Competitiveness, and Socialization at a Young Age: Evidence From a Matrilineal and a Patriarchal Society

Recent literature presents evidence that men are more competitively inclined than women. Since top-level careers usually require competitiveness, competitiveness differences provide an explanation for gender gaps in wages and differences in occupational choice. A natural question is whether women are born less competitive or whether they become so through the process of socialization. To pinpoint when in the socialization process the difference arises, we compare the competitiveness of children in matrilineal and patriarchal societies. We find that while there is no difference at any age in the matrilineal society, girls become less competitive around puberty in the patriarchal society.

Gift Exchange in a Multi-Worker Firm

One of the main findings of a large body of gift exchange experiments is that a considerable fraction of workers reward higher wages with higher effort. These results are observed for simple one-employer-one-worker relationships. In this article we investigate whether they generalise to the more realistic situation in which the employer employs several workers. We compare a bilateral gift exchange game with a treatment in which each employer has four workers. We find that effort levels in the latter treatment are only marginally lower. Gift exchange thus appears to be robust to increases in the size of the workforce.

Digital Piracy, Teens, and the Source of Advice: An Experimental Study

The objective of our paper is to determine the effect of piracy advice from various sources on the behavior of the music consumer. Specifically, does it matter if the source of advice has a stake in the outcome of the piracy decision? Does it matter if the source of advice has a social tie with the advisee? Accordingly, we conduct a laboratory experiment using teenagers and their parents as subjects, increasing the realism of the context by sampling potential pirates and their parents. Treatments represent various sources of piracy advice (e.g., the teens parent, a record label, or an external regulator). Subjects make decisions playing our new experimental game—The Piracy Game—extended from the volunteers dilemma literature. Interestingly, subjects respond negatively to advice from record labels over time, purchasing fewer songs as compared to other sources such as the subjects parent. The existence of a social tie between the adviser and the subject assists in mitigating piracy, especially when a parent is facing potential penalties due to his or her childs behavior. An external regulator, having no social tie or stake in the decision, provides the least credible source of advice, leading to the greatest amount of piracy. Our analyses not only provide managerial insights but also develop theoretical understanding of the role of social ties in the context of advice.

Information Feedback, Targeting, and Coordination: An Experimental Study

There are many contexts in which an “everybody else is doing it” attitude is relevant. We evaluate the impact of this attitude in a multithreshold public goods game. We use a lab experiment to study the role of providing information about contribution behavior to targeted subsets of individuals, and its effect on coordination. Treatments include one in which no information is provided and three other treatments, i.e., where information is provided to a random sample of subjects; to those whose contributions are below the average of their group, and to those whose contributions are above the average of their group. We find that the random provision of information is no different than not providing information. More important, average contributions improve with targeted treatments. Coordination waste is also lower with targeted treatments. The insights from this research are more broadly relevant in the contexts of piracy, open innovation, and crowdfunding. The online appendix is available at https://doi.or...