Gender & attractiveness in the ultimatum game within the sales force environment

Sales force in the Ultimatum Game

Hernández, R. & Perelló, I.

Gender & Attractiveness in the Ultimatum Game within the sales force environment
Rodrigo J. Hernández Martínez
Technical University Munich Carlos III University

and J. Ignacio Perelló Sánchez
Technical University Munich Carlos III University

Abstract How useful is in fact the ultimatum game? Through our experiment wewill be able to explain how gender and attractiveness (variables already studied in the ultimatum game environment but barely together), have a relationship with the final outcome in the sales force cluster. We conduct an ultimatum game experiment taking into account both variables trying to avoid others that we perceived like disruptive ones and which we personally think are the main reason whyresults from pervious studies are not consistent. All of this will help us to provide main guidelines to managers and sales people in order to succeed in today’s firms, which means use the economy as it’s primarily use, a normative science. Finally we give some possible main recommendations regarding firing and hiring policies and also recruitment characteristics a company should take into account dueto possible results that could come up.

Advanced topics in IOM: Management Research

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Sales force in the Ultimatum Game

Hernández, R. & Perelló, I.

Introduction
In the following paper we will develop a study based on the Ultimatum game, and our main topic will be to carry out an experiment within the sales forces cluster. Through our literature research we have realized that manyvariables like gender have been already treated in so many studies and others like attractiveness have been studied just some times, but both together just occasionally (Solnick & Schweitzer, 1999), and that is why we are going to use both in our study. We have thought that the relevance of a study is probably one of the most important characteristics and therefore we would like our study to be apractical one. And as long as the Ultimatum game is a bargaining game in terms of monetary results to get out of negotiation, we have think that the fact of implementing our final results in the sales environment is going to be easier than other studies and will help them to increase their performance. As we will see in the following chapter, we have seen that there are some studies carried outbetween the 1970s and the 1990s that emphasize the importance of gender in economical decisions, however the results are contradictory. This could happen because of so many different reasons, but we think basically in two. The first one because of the general approach of the studies, which means that disruptive variables appeared and could not been found and therefore were not corrected. The secondreason could be that research questions were barely defined and hence, results ambiguity. The way we are going to face and deal with these two perceived problems is basically make a very concrete focus of the experiment such as ours, in order to avoid the general approach and therefore the control over the variables can be higher and as long as we are detailing our research question ambiguity ofthe results would be lower, because the applied environment is going to be very specific. We know from quantitative analysis how important is defining in a good way the main hypothesis of the research question, to avoid ambiguity. But basically what we have found through our research is that scholars in general tried to explain gender or attractiveness variables in a general environment withouttaking into account physical conditions or people’s background. Hence, our first step was to focus on a specific cluster, such as the forces sales to study it in depth and could know more and increase the external validity of our experiment, and therefore be useful. What really matter about our study is going to be basically this external validity, how useful are the results, how good could we...