Lise Vesterlund
Biographic Data
| ID | 1163675 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Lise Vesterlund |
| GIVEN NAMES | Lise |
| FAMILY NAME | Vesterlund |
| SIGNATURE | VESTERLUND L |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Pittsburgh |
| VERIFIED | No |
| TOTAL WORKS | 10 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 40 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 10 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2001 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2024 |
| H-INDEX | 3 |
Evaluating Behavioral Incentive Compatibility: Insights from Experiments
Incentive compatibility is core to mechanism design. The success of auctions, matching algorithms, and voting systems all hinge on the ability to select incentives that make it in the individual’s interest to reveal their type. But how do we test whether a mechanism that is designed to be incentive compatible is actually so in practice, particularly when faced with boundedly rational agents with nonstandard preferences? We review the many experim…
Gender Differences in Negotiation: Evidence from Real Estate Transactions
Negotiations over real estate show that men secure better prices than women. However, gender differences decrease when improving controls for the property's value, and is eliminated when controlling for unobserved heterogeneity in a repeated-sales sample. Rather than evidence of differences in negotiation, price differences result from men and women demanding different properties. Consistently, we find no gender difference in sales prices secured…
Knowing When to Ask: The Cost of Leaning In
Gender differences in the propensity to negotiate are often used to explain the gender wage gap, popularizing the push for women to “lean-in.” We use a laboratory experiment to examine the effect of leaning-in. Despite men and women achieving similar and positive returns when they must negotiate, we find that women avoid negotiations more often than men. While this suggests that women would benefit from leaning-in, a direct test of the counterfac…
Gender Differences in Accepting and Receiving Requests for Tasks with Low Promotability
Gender differences in task allocations may sustain vertical gender segregation in labor markets. We examine the allocation of a task that everyone prefers be completed by someone else (writing a report, serving on a committee, etc.) and find evidence that women, more than men, volunteer, are asked to volunteer, and accept requests to volunteer for such tasks. Beliefs that women, more than men, say yes to tasks with low promotability appear as an …
Gender and Competition
Laboratory studies have documented that women often respond less favorably to competition than men. Conditional on performance, men are often more eager to compete, and the performance of men tends to respond more positively to an increase in competition. This means that few women enter and win competitions. We review studies that examine the robustness of these differences as well the factors that may give rise to them. Both laboratory and field…
The Fourfold Pattern of Risk Attitudes in Choice and Pricing Tasks
We examine the robustness of the fourfold pattern of risk attitudes under two elicitation procedures. We find that individuals are, on average, risk-seeking over low-probability gains and high-probability losses and risk-averse over high-probability gains and low-probability losses when we elicit prices for the gambles. However, a choice-based elicitation procedure, where participants choose between a gamble and its expected value, yields individ…
Explaining the Gender Gap in Math Test Scores: The Role of Competition
The mean and standard deviation in performance on math test scores are only slightly larger for males than for females. Despite minor differences in mean performance, many more boys than girls perform at the right tail of the distribution. This gender gap has been documented for a series of math tests including the AP calculus test, the mathematics SAT, and the quantitative portion of the Graduate Record Exam (GRE). The objective of this paper is…
Do Women Shy Away From Competition? Do Men Compete Too Much?
We examine whether men and women of the same ability differ in their selection into a competitive environment. Participants in a laboratory experiment solve a real task, first under a noncompetitive piece rate and then a competitive tournament incentive scheme. Although there are no gender differences in performance, men select the tournament twice as much as women when choosing their compensation scheme for the next performance. While 73 percent…
Learning to bargain
Which is the Fair Sex? Gender Differences in Altruism
We study gender differences in altruism by examining a modified dictator game with varying incomes and prices. Our results indicate that the question “which is the fair sex?” has a complicated answer—when altruism is expensive, women are kinder, but when it is cheap, men are more altruistic. That is, we find that the male and female “demand curves for altruism” cross, and that men are more responsive to price changes. Furthermore, men are more li…
Explaining the Gender Gap in Math Test Scores: The Role of Competition
The mean and standard deviation in performance on math test scores are only slightly larger for males than for females. Despite minor differences in mean performance, many more boys than girls perform at the right tail of the distribution. This gender gap has been documented for a series of math tests including the AP calculus test, the mathematics SAT, and the quantitative portion of the Graduate Record Exam (GRE). The objective of this paper is…
Knowing When to Ask: The Cost of Leaning In
Gender differences in the propensity to negotiate are often used to explain the gender wage gap, popularizing the push for women to “lean-in.” We use a laboratory experiment to examine the effect of leaning-in. Despite men and women achieving similar and positive returns when they must negotiate, we find that women avoid negotiations more often than men. While this suggests that women would benefit from leaning-in, a direct test of the counterfac…
The Fourfold Pattern of Risk Attitudes in Choice and Pricing Tasks
We examine the robustness of the fourfold pattern of risk attitudes under two elicitation procedures. We find that individuals are, on average, risk-seeking over low-probability gains and high-probability losses and risk-averse over high-probability gains and low-probability losses when we elicit prices for the gambles. However, a choice-based elicitation procedure, where participants choose between a gamble and its expected value, yields individ…
Learning to bargain
Which is the Fair Sex? Gender Differences in Altruism
We study gender differences in altruism by examining a modified dictator game with varying incomes and prices. Our results indicate that the question “which is the fair sex?” has a complicated answer—when altruism is expensive, women are kinder, but when it is cheap, men are more altruistic. That is, we find that the male and female “demand curves for altruism” cross, and that men are more responsive to price changes. Furthermore, men are more li…
Do Women Shy Away From Competition? Do Men Compete Too Much?
We examine whether men and women of the same ability differ in their selection into a competitive environment. Participants in a laboratory experiment solve a real task, first under a noncompetitive piece rate and then a competitive tournament incentive scheme. Although there are no gender differences in performance, men select the tournament twice as much as women when choosing their compensation scheme for the next performance. While 73 percent…
Learning to bargain
The Fourfold Pattern of Risk Attitudes in Choice and Pricing Tasks
We examine the robustness of the fourfold pattern of risk attitudes under two elicitation procedures. We find that individuals are, on average, risk-seeking over low-probability gains and high-probability losses and risk-averse over high-probability gains and low-probability losses when we elicit prices for the gambles. However, a choice-based elicitation procedure, where participants choose between a gamble and its expected value, yields individ…
Explaining the Gender Gap in Math Test Scores: The Role of Competition
The mean and standard deviation in performance on math test scores are only slightly larger for males than for females. Despite minor differences in mean performance, many more boys than girls perform at the right tail of the distribution. This gender gap has been documented for a series of math tests including the AP calculus test, the mathematics SAT, and the quantitative portion of the Graduate Record Exam (GRE). The objective of this paper is…
Gender and Competition
Laboratory studies have documented that women often respond less favorably to competition than men. Conditional on performance, men are often more eager to compete, and the performance of men tends to respond more positively to an increase in competition. This means that few women enter and win competitions. We review studies that examine the robustness of these differences as well the factors that may give rise to them. Both laboratory and field…
Gender Differences in Accepting and Receiving Requests for Tasks with Low Promotability
Gender differences in task allocations may sustain vertical gender segregation in labor markets. We examine the allocation of a task that everyone prefers be completed by someone else (writing a report, serving on a committee, etc.) and find evidence that women, more than men, volunteer, are asked to volunteer, and accept requests to volunteer for such tasks. Beliefs that women, more than men, say yes to tasks with low promotability appear as an …
Knowing When to Ask: The Cost of Leaning In
Gender differences in the propensity to negotiate are often used to explain the gender wage gap, popularizing the push for women to “lean-in.” We use a laboratory experiment to examine the effect of leaning-in. Despite men and women achieving similar and positive returns when they must negotiate, we find that women avoid negotiations more often than men. While this suggests that women would benefit from leaning-in, a direct test of the counterfac…
Gender Differences in Negotiation: Evidence from Real Estate Transactions
Negotiations over real estate show that men secure better prices than women. However, gender differences decrease when improving controls for the property's value, and is eliminated when controlling for unobserved heterogeneity in a repeated-sales sample. Rather than evidence of differences in negotiation, price differences result from men and women demanding different properties. Consistently, we find no gender difference in sales prices secured…
Evaluating Behavioral Incentive Compatibility: Insights from Experiments
Incentive compatibility is core to mechanism design. The success of auctions, matching algorithms, and voting systems all hinge on the ability to select incentives that make it in the individual’s interest to reveal their type. But how do we test whether a mechanism that is designed to be incentive compatible is actually so in practice, particularly when faced with boundedly rational agents with nonstandard preferences? We review the many experim…
Economics (9 works) · Experimental Behavioral Economics Studies (9 works) · Psychology (9 works) · Social Psychology (7 works) · Demographic economics (5 works) · Computer Science (4 works) · Decision-Making and Behavioral Economics (4 works) · Microeconomics (4 works) · Mathematics (3 works) · Political science (3 works)