‘The Devil is in the Details’Sex Differences in Simple Bargaining Games

The study of gender differences in social preferences has shown mixedresults, preventing economists and other social scientists from drawingdefinitive conclusions on this topic. Several original investigations andexperimental reviews have hypothesized that the main reason of this heterogeneityof results is the myriad of experimental designs used to studygender differences. In this paper we test this hypothesis by making maleand female participants to face two different but related experimentalgames and two different information treatments. Through this 2x2 factorialdesign, we obtain results in line with some recent papers: women aresensitive to the design and context of the experiment in ways that menare not. In addition, we go further providing a well-grounded account onthe importance of the context for female decision-making.