Attraction and cooperative behavior

Donja Darai () and Silvia Grätz

No 82, ECON - Working Papers from Department of Economics - University of Zurich

Abstract: Being good-looking seems to generate substantial benefits in many social interactions, making the "beauty premium" a not to be underrated economic factor. This paper investigates how physical attractiveness enables people to generate these benefits in the case of cooperation, using field data from a modified one-shot prisoner's dilemma played in a high-stakes television game show. While attractive contestants are not more or less cooperative than less attractive ones, facial attractiveness produces more cooperative behavior by counterparts, but only in mixed-gender interactions. Effects of attractiveness are therefore not exclusively due to "beauty-is-good" stereotyping, but rather operate through a preference-based mechanism.

Keywords: Beauty premium; gender; stereotypes; attractiveness; cooperation (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C71 D03 D83 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2012-06, Revised 2013-06
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-cbe, nep-evo, nep-exp, nep-gth, nep-neu and nep-soc
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (4)

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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:zur:econwp:082

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