《Beauty and the Sources of》.pdfVIP

* Beauty and the Sources of Discrimination Michèle Belot, V. Bhaskar, Jeroen van de Ven Forthcoming in Journal of Human Resources Abstract: We analyze discrimination against less attractive people on a TV game show with high stakes. The game has a rich structure that allows us to disentangle the relationship between attractiveness and the determinants of a player’s earnings. Unattractive players perform no worse than attractive ones, and are equally cooperative in the prisoner’s dilemma stage of the game. Nevertheless, they are substantially more likely to be eliminated by their peers, even though this is costly. We investigate third party perceptions of discrimination by asking subjects to predict elimination decisions. Subjects implicitly assign a role for attractiveness but underestimate its magnitude. * Michèle Belot is a research fellow at the Centre for Experimental Social Sciences of Nuffield College, University of Oxford. V. Bhaskar is full professor of economics at the University College London. Jeroen van de Ven is assistant professor at the Amsterdam Center for Law and Economics and the Department of Economics of the University of Amsterdam. The authors are very grateful to Dan Hamermesh, Gordon Kemp and two anonymous referees for very useful comments and suggestions, to Debbie Hall for research assistance, and they wish to thank seminar and conference participants at University College Dublin, University of St Andrews, University of Amsterdam, University of Essex (ISER), the GATE conference in Lyon (2007) and the ESPE conference in Chicago (2007). V. Bhaskar thanks the Economic and Social Research Council for support. The data used in this article can be obtained beginning six months after publication through thr