The Beauty Premium: Physical Attractiveness and Gender in Dictator Games

Are beautiful people better negotiators? In this article, I present evidence from a simple bargaining game in which players listened to prerecorded speeches and viewed the pictures of other players. I found that physically attractive players received a greater share of the surplus when their partners could both listen to their speeches and view their pictures.This effect was strongest when the listening partner was female.These results suggest new directions for experimental and empirical research on the role of nonresumé characteristics on labor market outcomes, and also has implications for those practitioners involved in negotiations characterized by extreme power imbalances between the parties.