Can output competition in output performance undermine ethnic discrimination during the hiring process?

1) Baseline: no employer competition
2) Treatment - employer competition: All the subjects will face an actual employer competition for those who have been selected by more than one subject. The following task is randomly assigned to be competitive or non-competitive (stimulating the competition in the long-term performance)
3) Treatment - Strategic interactions: Some subjects can receive additional information about the choice of other employers, during the hiring process. This is to distinguish the taste-based discrimination from the strategic interaction.

2020-12-01

2021-08-31

For each individual employee, i, whether i is being selcted by at least one employer from the majority group.

ethnical-sounding names (determined by reported birthplace), previous relative performance of i, size of the sessions, competitive hiring market (=1), competitive performance (=1), updating (=1)

For each individual employer, I, whether they choose select a candidate of same ethnic group as 1st preference

ethnical-sounding names (determined by reported birthplace), previous relative performance of 1st preference, size of the sessions, competitive hiring market (=1), competitive performance (=1), updating (=1)

The experiment includes two parts. The first part is to ask the subjects to finish several real effort tasks, to capture their differences in ability (aka productivity) and in the willingness to compete. The second part is to stimulate the recruitment process in the hiring market, with three different treatment. Treatment 1 is the baseline that all the subjects are allowed to select a partner freely to finish another real effort task. Treatment 2 is to introduce the employer competition in the selection process that all the subjects will face an actual employer competition for the popular candidates, who have been selected as 1st preference by more than one subject. Treatment 3 is to update the information about the choice of other "employers" to some subjects, and see how they respond in changing their hiring decision. The first two treatments are to test the competition effect on taste-based discrimination. And the last two treatments are to distinguish the non-profitable taste-based discrimination from profitable strategic interactions. The statistical discrimination is minimised by explicitly informing the actual productivity and language level during the hiring process. The in-group variable is determined by the reported birthplace. To avoid bias in self-creating identity, some subjects are randomly chosen as anonymous during the hiring process.

1) Practice Task
2) Part 1 Task 1: capture the ability in a piece-rate performance setting
3) Part 1 Task 2: capture the ability in a tournament performance setting
4) Part 1 Task 3: Capture the willingness to compete
5) Part 2 Task 1: Hiring process without employer competition/performance competition
6) Part 2 Task 2.1: Hiring process with employer competition, with or without performance competition
7) Part 2 Task 2.2: Update the choice of 1st preference for some subjects, with or without the information of other subjects' choices, under the competitive environment (followed by task 6)

Randomised by a computer and a computer software

Individual

No

120-200 subjects

120-200 observations

at least 20 sessions (5-8 subjects per session)