Do Women and Men Respond Differently to Pay Ranges in Job Ads?

The study will be conducted on Prolific. All individuals who are registered on the platform and satisfy the selection criteria will be eligible to participate. Our study aims to investigate the impact of the size of advertised pay ranges on a) the likelihood of accepting a job, b) the performance on the job, and c) the perceived deservingness and beliefs of the participants. The treatments will vary regarding the pay range that is provided to the participants and the gender of the participants.

The participants receive a fixed payment for participating in the study. All treatments start with a brief survey where we elicit demographic information, preferences (reciprocity and altruism), experience with touch typing, and experience on the platform. In addition, they receive information about an optional typing task and learn that they will receive a wage offer that is within a predefined range. After learning the wage offer, the participants decide whether to accept or reject the offer. If they reject the offer, before the study ends they are asked to complete some questions measuring deservingness, their belief about the average payment accepted by others, and loss aversion. If they accept the offer, they will work on the additional task and get paid accordingly. After the task ends but before the study is finished, they will also answer the questions measuring deservingness, their belief about their performance, their belief about the average payment accepted by others, and loss aversion. The treatments only differ in the pay range that we state in the beginning (narrow or wide) and the gender of the participants.

2024-07-08

2024-08-31

Our primary outcome is the likelihood that a participant accepts a given wage offer.

Acceptance: Binary variable equaling 1 if the participants accept the wage offer and 0 otherwise.

The performance on the job. The performance has two dimensions: quantity and quality
Stated deservingness
Belief about the average accepted payment by others

Performance Quantity: Number of submitted fragments in the real effort typing task.
Performance Quality: We construct a quality score based on the Levenshtein edit distance
Deservingness: Answer to the question: Please tell us the amount of the extra payment (in GBP) that you think you deserve for working on the optional task.
Belief about the average payment accepted by others: Answer to the question: Other Prolific participants were also offered the option to do the optional typing task for an extra payment. For those participants who chose to do so, what do you think was the average value of their extra payments?

We use a 2×2 design resulting in four treatments. First, we vary the information about the pay range. Second, we vary whether the participants identify themselves as men or women. The participants receive information about the pay range before they decide to accept or reject the optional typing task. The study will be executed on Prolific. We aim for a sample size of 1200.

The study will be run on Prolific. Participants will be allowed to participate if they are located in the U.S., have a minimum approval rate of 95%, have at least 100 previous submissions, are between 20 and 64 years old, and state that their gender is man or woman . Each participant will only be allowed to participate once.
We will exclude observations from the analysis where participants have spent less than one minute on the survey or only partially finished the study. We will focus our main analysis on participants self-identifying themselves as either a man or a woman. We will analyze data from participants self-identifying as “other” if we have sufficient data points.
We have four treatments which vary concerning the stated pay range and the gender of the participants. We will study two different pay ranges. The mean of the pay range distribution is the same in all treatments.

We will use the prescreening option by Prolific to ensure all men (and all women) sessions. We will randomly allocate the participants of one session to either the Narrow or the Wide treatment. The randomization within each session will be performed by the experimental software otree.

Experimental session

No

N.A.

1200

We have four treatments, with 300 participants in each treatment. This amounts to 1200 participants in the whole study.

We aim for a total sample size of 1200 observations to ensure sufficient power.