Survey_GHS_2014

Abstract

In the invitation email for the experiment, we asked business and economics students of Goethe-University Frankfurt to bring a current version of their résumé to the Frankfurt Laboratory for Experimental Economics (FLEX) for an experimental game and a survey on “Study Motivation, Specialization, and Occupational Choice.” Only subjects who complied were allowed to participate in the experiment. The experimenter collected the résumé and deleted any personal information (name, address, etc.) in front of the subject. To ensure the participation of sufficiently many subjects, we paid them a show-up fee of 20 Euros, which is extraordinarily high for this laboratory. The goal of our second study is to find out whether there is a lack of trust in people who have a high interest in working in the financial industry and/or professional experience in this sector. We therefore adopted the following experimental design. We recruited students from all faculties except from business and economics31 to play a prediction game that is strategically equivalent to the first-mover decision in the trust game. Specifically, subjects played the trust game as first-mover against randomly chosen subjects from Study 1 (from whom we have recorded all choices through the strategy method). Subjects from Study 1 did not get any additional payments or feedback from Study 2, and we made this clear to Study 2 participants. The only motive for sending positive amounts to the second-mover is trust. Since there are no payments to the second-mover, altruism or a taste for discrimination should not matter for the decision.