Second, we contribute to the growing literature on the role of attractiveness for decision making and economic outcomes. The positive correlation between physical attractiveness and wages, as well as other labor market outcomes, is a well-established result in the social and economic literature. Beauty has also been related to electoral success. As Fletcher notes, the reasons for a “beauty premium” in the labor market are largely unknown, as it might be caused by various forms of discrimination (either by employers or customers), or by self-selection to occupations where there is a higher reward for physical attractiveness. In addition, it has been found that more attractive people have better verbal skills, which could be useful when searching/negotiating for a job or for school performance. Experiments on social preferences have also shown that physically attractive people are seen to be more cooperative in the public goods game, are given higher offers in the ultimatum game but are also demanded of more, and are trusted more in the trust game than less attractive people. Combined, these results suggest that physical appearance could impact social stratification and the distribution of opportunities.
There are also previous examples of how the attractiveness of others affects men’s and women’s decision making differently. For example, Wilson and Daly show that men become more impatient when seeing an attractive woman than when seeing a less attractive woman, whereas women’s behavior is not affected by whether a male is attractive or not.
When considering attractiveness in the labor market, for instance at a job interview, it could be used as a proxy for health. An unhealthy individual may very well look less attractive and a lower degree of attractiveness could therefore indicate lower productivity.
Thus, when an employer chooses an attractive job applicant it does not have to be due to the fact that the applicant is attractive but rather because he or she signals a high level of health and productivity. The most obvious advantage with using chess data is the Elo rating which is a recurrently updated objective measure of a player’s chess skill.
In a field experiment on door-to-door charitable fundraising, Landry et al. (2006) find that male charitable donor prospects respond more than female prospects to female solicitor attractiveness. In another field experiment where mail with varying content (advertising content, loan price and loan offer deadlines) is sent out to former clients of a large consumer lender, Bertrand et al. find that when seeing the photo of an attractive woman in the ad, male clients take up significantly more loans whereas women do not react to the attractive woman nor to an attractive man. The effect for male borrowers is substantial: the presence of the female photo increases loan demand similarly to a 25 percent decrease in the interest rate.
Read the rest of the study at the IZA site.
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