UC Santa Barbara

The first chapter studies gender differences in persistence in response to performancefeedback. The decision to persist in stratified career trajectories is often dynamic in nature: people receive feedback and decide whether to persist or to drop out. I show experimentally that men are on average 10 percentage points more likely to persist in an environment that rewards high performance than equally performing women who received the same feedback. About one-third of this gap can be explained by gender differences in beliefs about the future. In the laboratory as well as a field study, men are more optimistic about their future performance even when compared to women who are similarly confident about their past performance. Another 30% of the gender gap in persistence is attributable to men seeking, and women avoiding exposure to additional feedback.

The second chapter is based on joint work with Mireille Jacobson and Heather Royer.We observe that fewer births occur on major US holidays than would otherwise be ex- pected. We use California data to study the nature and health implications of this birth date manipulation, and document 18 percent fewer births on the day of and just after a holiday. C-sections account for roughly half of the decline. “Missing” holiday births are moved to the roughly two-week window both before and after the holiday. High-risk births are more likely to be re-scheduled than low-risk births. Despite the documented change in timing, we find little evidence of any adverse health consequences for babies born around a holiday.

The third chapter is based on joint work with Hazem Alshaikhmubarak, David Hales,Molly Schwarz and Kent Strauss. We experimentally study how mutual payoff informa- tion affects play in strategic settings. Subjects play the Prisoner’s Dilemma or Stag Hunt game against randomly re-matched opponents under two information treatments. In our partial-information treatment subjects are shown only their own payoffs, while in our full-information treatment they are shown both their own and their opponent’s payoffs. In both treatments, they receive feedback on their opponent’s action after each round. We find that mutual payoff information initially facilitates reaching the Pareto-efficient outcome in both games. While play in the Prisoner’s Dilemma converges toward the unique Nash equilibrium of the game under both information treatments, mutual pay- off information has a substantial impact on the equilibrium selection in the Stag Hunt throughout all rounds of the game. Using a belief-learning model and simulations of play, we provide evidence that these effects are driven not only by initial play but also by the way subjects learn. We propose that strategic uncertainty is a probable channel through which payoff information affects play.