Abstract: 

We use a lab-based negotiation with alternating offers for a salaried lab job, and vary the gender of the counterpart, to study gender gaps in asking behaviour. Moreover, we assess if men and women accommodate differently to the request of the counterpart, and to the salience of the counterpart’s gender.  Using a pre-registered design, our experiment studies if women and men ask for the same salary for performing a job, and if they respond similarly to the request of the counterpart, exploiting a negotiation over a salaried job taking part in the lab, played with different counterparts over several rounds. Essentially, the negotiation follows an alternating offer set up over a fixed pie to be shared but that requires a job to be performed for the agreed upon negotiated salary. Players act either as employees doing the job, or as employers earning the residual of the fixed pie. We aim to address the questions: (i) with a fixed and known pie to be shared, do men and women initiate the negotiation asking for the same amount? and (ii) being confronted with the same request from the counterpart, do men and women differently give in, or accommodate, to that request, potentially fearing a negotiation break down at different levels depending upon the gender of the counterpart? Finally, to address salience of gender we add a control condition with no knowledge of the gender of the counterpart.

This paper explores the understudied link between shame elicitation and vaccine skepticism, combining an experimental approach with causal forests to estimate individual treatment effects. Leveraging data from a lab experiment with Italian university students, we find that individuals who are more easily induced to feeling shame tend to hold stronger vaccine misbeliefs. Rather than a causal effect of shame elicitation on vaccine attitudes, our results highlight a correlation between pre-treatment attitudes and susceptibility to shame. This underlines the importance of policy interventions aimed at effective public health communication, since more skeptical individuals might avoid discussing with health professionals or develop shame as the result of these discussions, further exacerbating their vaccine hesitancy.