Experience and Gender Effects in an Acquiring-a-Company Experiment Allowing for Value Messages

This paper focuses on a bargaining experiment in which the privately informed seller of a company sends a value message to the uninformed potential buyer who then proposes a price for acquiring the company. Participants are constantly in the role of either seller or buyer and interact over 30 rounds with randomly changing partners in the other role. We test how overstating the value of the company, underpricing the received value message and acceptance of price offers are affected by experience and gender (constellation). Like in our companion paper on single play (Di Cagno et al. 2015) we control via treatments for awareness of gender (constellation). One main hypothesis is that gender (constellation) matters but that the effects become weaker with more experience and that the main experience effects apply across gender (constellations)