Do Women Ask For Less and Give-In More Than Men do In A Negotiation? A Lab-Based Study of Gender Gaps In Asking and Accommodating Behavior

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.