Make-Up and Suspicion in Acquiring-a-Company. An Experiment Controlling for Gender and Gender Constellations

The privately informed seller of a company sends a value message to the uninformed potential buyer who then proposes a price for the company. “Make-up” is measured by how much the true value is overstated, “Suspicion” by how much the price offer differs from the value message. Treatments vary in information about gender via (not) informing about the gender constellation and in embeddedness of gender information. Female participants engage more in “make-up”, i.e. overstate more the value of the company, but are not more “suspicious”. Furthermore, homogeneous female constellations make up more