Taste-Based Gender Favoritism in High Stakes Decisions: Evidence from The Price Is Right

Abstract

Gender discrimination has been observed in a variety of field settings. Identifying the underlying mechanism behind discrimination in such settings, however, is notoriously difficult. We demonstrate own-gender favoritism in a field setting that allows for clean identification of tastes versus beliefs: the One Bid game on the TV game show The Price Is Right. In the game, players bid sequentially to guess the closest to the value of a prize without exceeding it, leaving the last bidder with a dominant `cutoff' strategy of bidding $1 more than another player. Despite large stakes for gender-neutral play, last bidders are significantly more likely to cut off opposite-gender opponents. We show how features of the game allow us to disentangle preferences for own-gender favoritism from beliefs that cutting off opposite-gender opponents is more profitable, and that only the former could explain this behavior.

Keywords: Gender Favoritism, Taste-Based Discrimination, Game Show, Stereotypes

JEL Classification: D7, J3, J7