W e conduct a laboratory experiment to study how advice by a more experienced and better-informed person affects an individual's entry into a real-effort tournament and the gender gap. Our experiment is motivated by the concerns raised by approaching the gender gap through affirmative action policies. Overall, advice improves the entry decision of subjects, in that forgone earnings due to wrong entry decisions go significantly down. The improvements are mainly driven by increased entry of strong-performing women, who also become more confident, and reduced entry of weak-performing men. We find that the overall gender gap persists even though it disappears among low and strong performers. The persistence is due to an emerging gender gap among intermediate performers driven by women (men) following more the advice to stay out of (enter) the tournament in this performance group.

We conduct a laboratory experiment to study how, after a history of decay, cooperation in a repeated voluntary contribution game can be revived in an enduring way. Simply starting the repeated game over—a simple fresh start—leads to an initial increase of cooperation, but to a subsequent new decay. Motivated by cooperation decay in organizations we study the potential of three interventions of triggering higher and sustained cooperation, which take place at the same time as a restart. Surprisingly, we find that the detailed explanation of the causes of the decay in cooperation of Fischbacher and Gächter (Am Econ Rev 100:541–556, 2010) combined with an advice on how to prevent decay do not have an effect beyond that of just starting over. In contrast, a one-way free form communication message sent by the leader to the followers strongly revives cooperation. We find evidence that repeated free form communication by the leader further strengthens the reviving effect on cooperation. Combining the two previous interventions does not outperform the pure effect of communication. Our content analysis reveals that leader communication is more people oriented than the expert advice.Electronic supplementary materialThe online version of this article (doi:10.1007/s10683-015-9468-6) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users.

The persistent lack of workplace diversity in management and leadership may lead to organizational vulnerabilities. White males occupy most high-profile positions in the largest U.S. corporations whereas African Americans, Hispanics, and women are clearly underrepresented in leadership roles. While many firms and other organizations have set ambitious goals to increase demographic diversity, there is a dearth of empirical evidence on effective ways to reach them. We use a natural field experiment to test several hypotheses on effective means to attract minority candidates for top professional careers. By randomly varying the content in recruiting materials of a major financial services corporation with over 10,000 employees, we test different types of signals regarding the extent and manner in which the employer values diversity among its workers. We find that signaling explicit interest in employee diversity can reverse the ethnicity gap in rates of interest and applications, and that it has a strong positive effect on interest in openings among racial minority candidates, the likelihood that they apply, and the probability that they are selected. These results uncover an effective method for disrupting monocultures in management through a minor intervention that influences sorting among job-seekers into high-profile careers.

In this chapter we present a first survey of laboratory studies using communication. We first discuss a number of issues about the implementation of communication in the laboratory. In particular we discuss variations in the channels, the structure and the content analysis of communication. Second, we survey a number of studies in which the effects of free-form communication are compared to those with more restricted communication. We finish with a brief reference to the question why communication matters, to what the mechanisms through which communication affects behavior are. Table 1: Dimensions of communication 4 We do not cover communication in field experiments. CHANNELS OF COMMUNICATIONPossible channels of communication in laboratory experiments are paper-and-pencil messages, chat, audio, video, or face-to-face interactions. The following is an incomplete reference list. Paper-and-pencil (Charness and Dufwenberg 2006) and chat messages (Brandts, Charness, and Ellman, 2016;Brandts, Rott, and Sola, 2016) are sent in written form, whereas audio (Greiner et al. 2012), video (Brosig et al. 2003Greiner et al. 2012), and face-to-face messages (Isaac and Walker 1988;Bochet et al. 2006;Schram et al. forthcoming) are usually exchanged orally. In faceto-face communication, participants meet physically and verbally communicate with each other (for instance, Isaac and Walker, 1988).The main drawback of audio, video and face-to-face communication is that typically they do not allow for (complete) anonymity, which entails that the interaction between participants does not necessarily stop at the end of the experiment. 5 An additional limitation of face-to-face communication is the difficulty of creating a record of what has been said. By contrast, chat, audio, and video messages can be recorded, transmitted and analyzed at a later stage (for instance, to a subsequent generation as in Chaudhuri et al., 2009). a computerized experiment, a chat window opens (or participants have the option to open it) and participants can type in text messages. 6 STRUCTURE OF COMMUNICATIONWith the term 'structure' we refer here to the arrangements of who can communicate to whom, when, in what order, and how often. All these elements can be tightly controlled in the laboratory and this control allows for many potentially interesting variations. This makes it possible to study the general phenomenon of 'communication' in a very systematic way. We organize our discussion of structure into three subsections: network and direction, frequency/repetition, and order and timing. COMMUNICATION NETWORK AND DIRECTIONIn experiments involving only two participants the only issue is whether they both can communicate with the other participant or whether only one of the two can (and who it is). In experiments with more than two participants, there are even more possibilities, since now there are several options both with respect to who can talk to whom and who can listen to whom. The structure of these connections is what we refer to as communication netw...