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Social stigma and subsequent competitive behavior

Last registered on July 21, 2022

Pre-Trial

Trial Information

General Information

Title
Social stigma and subsequent competitive behavior
RCT ID
AEARCTR-0009757
Initial registration date
July 15, 2022

Initial registration date is when the trial was registered.

It corresponds to when the registration was submitted to the Registry to be reviewed for publication.

First published
July 21, 2022, 11:35 AM EDT

First published corresponds to when the trial was first made public on the Registry after being reviewed.

Locations

Region

Primary Investigator

Affiliation
Texas A&M University

Other Primary Investigator(s)

PI Affiliation
Texas A&M University
PI Affiliation
Texas A&M University

Additional Trial Information

Status
Completed
Start date
2019-10-14
End date
2019-11-14
Secondary IDs
Prior work
This trial is based on or builds upon one or more prior RCTs.
Abstract
Income and resource inequalities are prevalent in modern society. Inequality gives rise to social classes and with it the emergence of social status based on desirable social image characteristics. We study how eligibility for a special social benefit based on low performance influences preferences for competitiveness using the tournament entry game in Niederle and Vesterlund (2007). This research question is important because participation in welfare programs may affect the preferences for competition of eligible recipients and contribute to wage disparities.There are two stages in our experiment. In the first stage, participants are randomly assigned to groups of three and they respond to a general knowledge quiz and based on their performance they are assigned as the low, medium, or high performing individual with higher earnings for higher performance. The lowest-performing individuals are eligible to receive a “welfare benefit” that they have to claim by coming to the front of the room, thereby inducing feelings of stigma associated with the benefit . We exogenously manipulate the benefit eligibility by adding a plausible deniability treatment in which we expanded the benefit eligibility criteria to the middle performing individuals. The size of the benefit relative to the earnings is 50% and 25% for the low and middle performance individuals. During the second stage subjects participate in an individual task paid piece-rate that serves as practice and to observe ability before deciding whether to enter a tournament competition in the same type of task.
External Link(s)

Registration Citation

Citation
Brown, Alexander, Marco Palma and Natalia Valdez Gonzalez. 2022. "Social stigma and subsequent competitive behavior." AEA RCT Registry. July 21. https://doi.org/10.1257/rct.9757-1.1
Experimental Details

Interventions

Intervention(s)
Intervention Start Date
2019-10-14
Intervention End Date
2019-11-14

Primary Outcomes

Primary Outcomes (end points)
Benefit Claim
Competitiveness
Primary Outcomes (explanation)

Secondary Outcomes

Secondary Outcomes (end points)
Secondary Outcomes (explanation)

Experimental Design

Experimental Design
Part 1: Status assignment and benefit allocation
Part 2: Competition
Part 3: Additional tasks
Experimental Design Details
Part 1: Status assignment and benefit allocation
Participants are randomly grouped in groups of 3. They are informed that they will complete a 15-question general knowledge quiz that will assign them a status within their group. Each status is assigned a differential payment scheme, and this is information given ahead of time. Once the quiz is completed, they are notified that certain individuals are eligible for an additional benefit. In the control, only those who are low status are eligible for an additional $1. In the plausible deniability treatment, those in the low and middle status are eligible for a $1 benefit. They are notified that they must come up to the front of the room if they want this additional benefit. Once they have the opportunity to decide if they want this benefit if eligible, they learn their status. The experimenter then calls those who claimed the benefit to the front of the room to receive a token for the additional $1.

Part 2: Competition

Following Niederle & Vesterlund (2007), participants first complete as many five 2-digit summations as possible in 5 minutes, paid at 50 cents per correct answer (piece-rate). They are then given the option to either do the same exercise again at the same payment schedule or select into competition within their group assignment from the first exercise. If choosing to compete, the payment is $1.50 per correct answer for the winner and $0 otherwise. They do not know their performance at any stage, but are asked what their beliefs are regarding their own relative performance.

Part 3: Additional tasks
These include risk preferences, social preferences, shyness, and demographics to check for balance and covariates.
Randomization Method
Alternate treatments
Randomization Unit
session level
Was the treatment clustered?
Yes

Experiment Characteristics

Sample size: planned number of clusters
100 groups of 3
Sample size: planned number of observations
300
Sample size (or number of clusters) by treatment arms
150 control, 150 treatment
Minimum detectable effect size for main outcomes (accounting for sample design and clustering)
Based off of Friedrichsen, König, and Schmacker (2018) public quiz versus random subsidized treatment, 12.8 percentage points difference in claim of the benefit (sd 0.071) would result in a sample size of 266.
IRB

Institutional Review Boards (IRBs)

IRB Name
Texas A&M University Institutional Review Board
IRB Approval Date
2019-10-02
IRB Approval Number
IRB2018-1024

Post-Trial

Post Trial Information

Study Withdrawal

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Intervention

Is the intervention completed?
Yes
Intervention Completion Date
November 14, 2019, 12:00 +00:00
Data Collection Complete
Yes
Data Collection Completion Date
November 14, 2019, 12:00 +00:00
Final Sample Size: Number of Clusters (Unit of Randomization)
92
Was attrition correlated with treatment status?
No
Final Sample Size: Total Number of Observations
276
Final Sample Size (or Number of Clusters) by Treatment Arms
138 in control, 138 in treatment
Data Publication

Data Publication

Is public data available?
No

Program Files

Program Files
Reports, Papers & Other Materials

Relevant Paper(s)

Abstract
Social signaling influences economic behavior. For instance, individuals may exhaust resources to competitively signal higher levels of social status. Conversely, individuals may avoid signaling their status to minimize the stigma associated with low status. We conduct a laboratory experiment to explore how the stigma from benefit eligibility drives subsequent decisions to enter a tournament competition. Similar to previous work, we induce a stigma associated with a benefit for the low-status group. We then introduce a treatment to reduce stigma by expanding the benefit eligibility to a middle-status group in a ``plausible deniability'' treatment. While we do not observe evidence of a stigma affecting benefit take-up for the low-status group, we do observe a difference in preferences for competitiveness in a subsequent and unrelated task. When newly-eligible individuals qualify for the benefit, their rate of entry into a subsequent and unrelated tournament is reduced by 17-20 percentage points compared to the treatment in which they do not qualify. A potential interpretation of our results would suggest expansion of eligibility of certain government assistance programs may produce unintended consequences for the newly eligible.
Citation
Valdez Gonzalez, Natalia and Brown, Alexander L. and Palma, Marco A., Social-Benefits Stigma and Subsequent Competitiveness. Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=4479804 or http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.4479804

Reports & Other Materials