Essays on Information and Gender

Abstract

Chapter 1 studies the effect of different feedback structures on belief updating in an ego-relevant task using a controlled experiment. Across treatments, subjects receive feedback through a signal with either a noise component, a comparison component, or both. The first two signals are commonly used in the literature, while I develop the latter to systematically analyze the effect of noise and comparison components on belief updating. I find that the signal structure is an important determinant of how subjects update their beliefs. This is driven by men and women exhibiting different biases depending on whether the signal is noisy or comparative. Men underweight bad news when the signal has a noise component and women underweight good news when the signal has a comparison component. These findings have implications for policies aiming to reduce the well-established gender gap in self-confidence through feedback provision.

In Chapter 2, I experimentally investigate whether there is a gender difference in advice giving in a gender-neutral task with varying difficulty in which the incentives of the sender and the receiver are perfectly aligned. I find that women are more reluctant to give advice compared to men for difficult questions. The gender difference in advice giving cannot be explained by gender differences in performance. Self-confidence explains some of the gender gap, but not all. The gender gap disappears if advice becomes enforceable. I discuss possible underlying mechanisms that are consistent with the findings.

Voluntary disclosure literature suggests that in evidence games, where the informed sender chooses which pieces of evidence to disclose to the uninformed receiver who determines his payoff, commitment has no value, as there is a theoretical equivalence of the optimal mechanism and the game equilibrium outcomes. In Chapter 3, Erkut Ozbay and I experimentally investigate whether the optimal mechanism and the game equilibrium outcomes coincide in a simple evidence game. Contrary to the theoretical equivalence, our results indicate that outcomes diverge and that commitment has value. We also theoretically show that our experimental results are explained by accounting for lying averse agents.