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Costless discrimination and unequal achievements in an experimental tournament

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  14 March 2025

Antonio Filippin  and
Francesco Guala
Antonio Filippin*
Affiliation:
Department of Economics, Management and Quantitative Methods, Università Degli Studi di Milano, Milano, Italy
Francesco Guala*
Affiliation:
Department of Economics, Management and Quantitative Methods, Università Degli Studi di Milano, Milano, Italy
*
e-mail: [email protected]
e-mail: [email protected]
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Abstract

We investigate the emergence of discrimination in an experiment where individuals affiliated to different groups compete for a monetary prize, submitting independent bids to an auctioneer. The auctioneer receives perfect information about the bids (there is no statistical discrimination), and she has no monetary incentive to favor the members of her own group (the bidders are symmetric). We observe nonetheless some discrimination by auctioneers, who tend to assign the prize more frequently to a member of their own group when two or more players put forward the highest bid. Out-group bidders react to this bias and reduce significantly their bids, causing an average decay of their earnings throughout the game, with cumulative effects that generate unequal outcomes. Because the initial bias is costless, such mechanism can survive even in a competitive market, providing a rationale for the long-run persistence of discrimination.

Keywords

DiscriminationTournamentGroupsExperiment

JEL classification

J71: Discrimination D44: Auctions C9: Design of Experiments
Type
Original Paper
Information
Experimental Economics , Volume 16 , Issue 3 , September 2013 , pp. 285 - 305
Copyright
Copyright © 2012 Economic Science Association

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Footnotes

Electronic Supplementary Material The online version of this article (doi:https://doi.org/10.1007/s10683-012-9334-8) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users.

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Supplementary material: File

Filippin and Guala supplementary material

Online material - Experimental instructions
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Filippin and Guala supplementary material

Online material - Figure 1A: Average bidding patterns in each independent sub-group
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