Experimental Design
The intervention consists of a representative survey combined with a vignette experiment to explore the role of gender, wage, and safety concerns in job acceptance decisions involving commuting risks. We plan to collect data from 5,000 Italian individuals, split equally across two waves (2,500 per wave). Each wave will be independently representative based on gender, age groups (19-24 and 25-29 years), education level (high school graduates vs. university graduates), geographic region, and metropolitan vs. non-metropolitan area to ensure consistency in sample composition across both waves. The survey gathers detailed demographic, socio-economic, and commuting information, and includes questions related to personal safety perceptions examining whether these concerns influence job choices. It focuses on participants’ willingness to accept job, given conditions that impact commuting safety, such as remote work options or shifts within daylight hours. Following the survey, participants are subject to a vignette experiment where they are presented with a fictional scenario involving a protagonist who must choose between two job options. Option 1 offers better career advancement prospects but requires commuting within a broad time range (6:00 am to 11:00 pm). Option 2 provides a daylight-only commute with limited career growth potential and a fixed wage.
The experiment varies according to three dimensions. The first dimension is the gender of the protagonist, with some participants seeing a man and others seeing a woman. The second random variation concerns with the commuting environment described in the scenario: one version of the vignette describes a potentially unsafe environment, in which the protagonist has to walk through some areas of the city that are sparsely populated and poorly illuminated, in order to reach the workplace, located in an isolated neighbourhood. In the other version, the workplace is in the city centre and well connected by public transport, making commuting safe and practical. The third dimension involves three wage levels, and respondents are randomly subject to one of the three variations of the potential wage. More precisely, some respondents see both job options offering the same wage, others see a higher wage in the first option compared to the second, and the third version displays the highest wage level in the first option, while the wage in the second remains fixed. Note that age and level of education of the protagonist are in line with participants’ age and education level, in order to make them identify with the protagonist more easily, and also wage offers are consistent with the level of education (€1200/1500/1800 for high school graduate respondents, €1400/1700/2100 for university graduates).
Participants are randomly assigned to one of the 12 vignette versions with equal probability, ensuring balanced exposure across all conditions. Among these versions, the baseline vignette is the one featuring a male protagonist, a safe commuting environment, and the lowest wage level. This neutral baseline condition serves as a reference point for measuring the causal effects of gender, commuting safety, and wage variations on participants’ responses. Respondents are asked to provide two key responses: their estimation of how many people in their reference group would recommend one of the two options (second-order belief) and their own recommendation about the same option (first-order belief). These measures aim to reveal the causal impact of the protagonist’s gender, commuting conditions, and wage offer on social norms related to job choices. Hypotheses include the expectation that safer options are recommended more frequently for female protagonists than for male ones and that higher wage levels will increase the tendency to advise riskier commutes, with a stronger effect observed for men.
Together, the survey and vignette experiment explore how gendered safety concerns, wage incentives, and social norms interact to shape job and commuting preferences, with a focus on the role of safety perception in job-related decision-making.