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 inembeddedness 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.