Can competition in the hiring market undermine ethnic discrimination during the hiring process?

1)Baseline (Treatment A): No hiring and wage competition
2)Treatment B: Hiring competition with a fixed wage regime
3)Treatment C: Hiring competition and wage competition (flexible wage regime)

2021-12-01

2024-02-01

The probability of a minority candidate being hired by at least one participant, controlled by given scores (rank), age, treatments and before or after updating process.

1) Hypothesis 1: The probability of minority employees being hired are lower in A than in B-1 and B-2
2) Hypothesis 2: The probability of minority employees being hired are lower in A than in C-1 and C-2
3) Hypothesis 3: The probability of minority employees being hired are lower in C-2 than in B-2

The experiment includes 2 parts:1) a preliminary phase. We will ask the participants to finish a series of tasks and an exit survey to capture their productivity and demographic information. This information will be used in the second part; 2) a hiring game. In the hiring game, we have three treatments: baseline -treatment A (without hiring and wage competition), fixed-wage -treatment B (with hiring competition only), flexible wage -treatment C (with both hiring and wage competition).

All the treatments are between-subject designs and each session will be randomly assigned to one of the treatments. Baseline Treatment (Treatment A) has neither hiring competition nor wage competition. In Treatment A, employers will receive the profiles of all candidates, including the scores of a randomly drawn task, "type" information to reflect the ethnicity, and a number of higher education completed. Each employer must select an employee from all the candidates, and they will form a group automatically without any restrictions. Each employee will receive £1 wages from their employers. This means employers must give up £1 as a wage to their selected employees. Employers will also gain a payment based on employees' scores in another drawn task, and they can earn £0.6 per score. Employers will not earn negative payments from the hiring game and therefore the minimum payment for the hiring game is 0.

In Treatment B, participants will have competition in hiring but they cannot practice wage competition. This means if an employee candidate is selected by more than 1 employer, the candidate will be assigned to 1 group randomly, and the other participant(s) will have no paired employee and earn 0 and finish the experiment. This setting is to avoid them always selecting the same candidate. Each employee will receive £1 wages from their employers.

In Treatment C, employers will have competition in both hiring and wage offers. During the selection, employers can not only select their employees but also select a wage that they are willing to give up to their hired employees. They can choose a wage from the following number: £1, £1.5, £2, £2.5 and £3.and if more than one employer selects the highest wage, the candidate will be paired with one of the highest wage employers. And the other employers will have no employees and finish the experiment with 0 payments. Employers will a paired employee will earn £0.6 per score of another randomly drawn task.

randomised by a computer

individual employee candidate

Yes

Each treatment has 100 sessions. So there will be 300 sessions

Each session has 12 employee candidates and 4 participants. The total observations are 48*300 =14400 observations

300 sessions