The Gender Pay Gap: Can Behavioral Economics Provide Useful Insights?

摘要

A large proportion of behavioral economics studies rely on various economic games, which have the advantage to depict a decisional situation in a simplified form. The Ultimatum Game (UG, Güth et al., 1982) is a decision-making task that illustrates a negotiation scenario. The standard UG involves two players. The first player, also known as the proposer, has the task of dividing a certain amount of money with a second player, called the responder. The responder can choose to accept or reject the received offer. Should the responder accept the offer, the money is divided between the two players per the proposer's offer. However, if the responder decides to reject the offer, then neither player gets any money. Most frequently, when participating in an UG task, both players are informed regarding the rules of the game, the amount of money that is to be shared and the consequences of their possible actions (Güth and Kocher, 2014). Based on two economic assumptions, namely participants' rationality and their interest in maximizing their gain (Camerer and Fehr, 2006), the normative solution for the UG would be for the proposer to send the minimum possible amount to the responder. For the responder, it would be expected to accept any non-zero amount. Nevertheless, both players behave in a significantly different manner compared to the normative behavior. More specifically, it was found that most proposers offer a larger proportion of the pie to share, approximately 50% of the total amount. Also, responders' behavior deviates from normative expectations because lower offers, of 20% or less of the total amount, are rejected by most participants (Camerer, 2003).