Do Minorities Misrepresent Their Ethnicity to Avoid Discrimination?

Nikoloz Kudashvili () and Philipp Lergetporer

No 7861, CESifo Working Paper Series from CESifo

Abstract: Discrimination against minorities is pervasive in many societies, but little is known about minorities’ strategies to avoid being discriminated against. In our trust game among 758 high-school students in the country of Georgia, ethnic Georgian trustors discriminate against the ethnic Armenian minority group. We introduce an initial signaling stage to investigate Armenians’ willingness to hide their ethnicity to avoid expected discrimination. 43 percent of Armenian trustees untruthfully signal to have a Georgian name. Signaling behavior is driven by expected transfers and non-pecuniary motives. This strategic misrepresentation of ethnicity increases Georgian trustors’ expected back transfers and eliminates their discriminatory behavior.

Keywords: discrimination; trust game; experiment; signaling; adolescents (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C91 C93 D83 D90 J15 J16 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2019
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-exp and nep-lab
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.cesifo.org/DocDL/cesifo1_wp7861.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Working Paper: Do Minorities Misrepresent Their Ethnicity to Avoid Discrimination? (2019)
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:ces:ceswps:_7861

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in CESifo Working Paper Series from CESifo Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Klaus Wohlrabe ().