Abstract
We study whether a seller's gender impacts the bargained-for price in a product market, specifically baseball cards. We isolate the seller's gender using an online transaction exposing the buyer to the seller's gender via the seller's hand and name. In both a field experiment, in which we actually sell cards on eBay, and a laboratory experiment, in which we conduct surveys via Amazon Mechanical Turk, we find, contrary to current literature, that women sell baseball cards for a higher price and greater profit compared to men. The observed discrimination appears to be both statistical and taste based. These findings contribute to the law and economics literature on discrimination and have ramifications for the economic opportunities of women in the retail marketplace and for the law of gender discrimination.
| Original language | English (US) |
|---|---|
| Pages (from-to) | 228-267 |
| Number of pages | 40 |
| Journal | American Law and Economics Review |
| Volume | 25 |
| Issue number | 1 |
| DOIs | |
| State | Published - 2023 |
Funding
We thank Ian Ayres, Colleen Chien, Shari Diamond, Peter DiCola, Miguel de Figueiredo, Jonathan Koehler, Tamar Kricheli-Katz, Matthew Kugler, Janice Nadler, Sarath Sanga, Roseanna Sommers, Matthew Spitzer, Deborah Tuerkheimer, Corey Yung, and participants at the Northwestern Pritzker School of Law and Richmond Law School faculty workshops, the 2018 Empirical Legal Studies Annual Conference at the University of Michigan, and the 2019 Annual Meeting of the American Law & Economics Association at the NYU School of Law for helpful comments and suggestions on previous drafts, Isaac Ashworth, Isabella Nascimento, and Charles Tammons for excellent research assistance, and Eleanor Wilking for tremendous assistance with the empirical analysis. Masur thanks the David & Celia Hilliard Fund and the Wachtell, Lipton, Rosen & Katz Program in Behavioral Law, Finance & Economics for support.
ASJC Scopus subject areas
- Finance
- Law
