Experimental Design Details
The preliminary phase is designed to generate actual profiles of candidates for use in the second phase of the hiring game. The benefit of using actual profiles is to introduce actual costs for discriminatory behaviour and therefore capture the actual level of employer discrimination (Hedegaard & Tyran, 2018). During this phase, we are going to ask participants to finish an individual experiment, including five individual tasks with 2 minutes each. The individual task is a 4-letter word anagram that participants need to correctly rearrange as many as possible sets of 4 letters to a meaningful word in 2 minutes. At the end of this phase, we will ask participants to finish an exit survey to capture their individual demographic differences. With five 4-letter anagram tasks, we are able to measure each individual's productivity and generate the inputs for the second phase of the hiring game.
The second phase is a hiring game, in which we will introduce four different treatments, a soft AA policy for an ethnic minority group, a soft AA policy for a randomly selected group, and baselines for both with and without information about ethnicity. In the second part of a hiring game, we will only recruit the majority as our participants. The majority are those who self-reported as White, currently live in the U.S., are born in the U.S., use English as their first native language. And all the participants for this experiment need to make two decisions: 1) hiring decision 2) estimation decision.
Prior to making a hiring decision, all profiles will go through a “pre-screen process" in which the computer will randomly select three of the five tasks completed by the individuals of profiles during the preliminary phase and rank all 12 profiles, as Task A, Task B and Task C. We will use the score of Task A for pre-screen. And we will give the score of Task B for employers to make the hiring decision and estimate the score of Task C.
Only 4 profiles will be selected as candidates during the hiring decision. During the hiring decision, participants will receive the profiles of four candidates, including scores of another drawn task (different from task used in “pre-screen process"), and age. Whether the ethnicity type of each candidate is included in the profiles, and the way for selecting 4 candidates' profiles are different treatments by treatments. We have 4 different treatments:
- Baseline (1): The profiles of the top 4 best performers will enter the candidate pool for all participants to choose from. During the selection,
the ethnic type will not be explicitly informed.
- Baseline – Type (2): The profiles of the top 4 best performers will enter the candidate pool for all participants to choose from. During the
selection, the ethnic type will be explicitly informed.
- Soft AA – Type (3): The profiles of the top 2 best-performing minorities and the top 2 best-performing non-selected remainders will enter the candidate pool. During the selection, the ethnic type will be explicitly informed.
- Soft AA – Lucky (4): Half of the profiles will be assigned as “lucky", and half will be assigned as “unlucky". The profile of the top 2 best performing individuals from the “lucky" group and the top 2 best-performing non-selected remainders will enter the candidate pool. During the selection, the ethnic type will not be explicitly informed.