I am happy to share that my first working paper titled „How Well Do Women Sell?“ (joint work with Holger Kraft and Farina Weiss) is available online on SSRN.
This paper documents a gender revenue gap arising when individuals sell personal belongings such as china, jewelry, paintings, toys, and furniture. We study a novel data set that is hand-collected from a popular TV show which is watched every weekday by more than 2 million people. The median appraisal value of an item is 500 euros and the total value of all items sold is about 1,490,000 euros. The sales occur through an English auction during which sellers can try to influence the outcome and post-auction negotiation with the highest bidder is possible. After controlling for a host of covariates, women lose on average about 7.3% compared to men. We document heterogeneity across items: Women perform worse if they sell items that are incongruent with the female gender role or items where the valuation of the bidders is disperse. The gap is greatest if the item is both female-incongruent and disperse-valued. We further show that the relative performance of women depends on both seller characteristics (age, education, attractiveness, optimism, sentiment) and dealer-team characteristics (generosity, activeness, pushiness, and average age of male dealers). Finally, we provide evidence that female teams perform significantly better than single females. In fact, they do as well as single males.
