Taste-Based Gender Favouritism in High Stakes Decisions: Evidence from The Price Is Right

Abstract Gender discrimination is present across various fields, but identifying the underlying mechanism is challenging. We demonstrate own-gender favouritism in a field setting that allows for clean identification of tastes versus beliefs: the One Bid game on the TV show The Price Is Right. Players must guess an item’s value without exceeding it, leaving the last bidder with a dominant ‘cutoff’ strategy of overbidding another player by ${\$}$1. We show that last bidders are significantly more likely to cut off opposite-gender opponents. This behaviour is explained by own-gender favouritism rather than beliefs that cutting off opposite-gender opponents is more profitable.