Does information affect homophily?

• 成果类型: Article
• 署名作者: Gallen, Yana; Wasserman, Melanie
• 署名单位: University of Chicago; University of California System; University of California Los Angeles; Aarhus University
• 刊物名称: JOURNAL OF PUBLIC ECONOMICS
• ISSN/ISSBN: 0047-2727
• DOI: 10.1016/j.jpubeco.2023.104876
• 发表日期: 2023
• 关键词: Homophily; Mentorship; Preference elicitation; GENDER

摘要

It is common for mentorship programs to use race, gender, and nationality to match mentors and men -tees. Despite the popularity of these programs, there is little evidence on whether mentees value mentors with shared traits. Using novel administrative data from an online college mentoring platform connecting students and alumni, we document that female students indeed disproportionately reach out to female mentors. We investigate whether female students make costly trade-offs in order to access a female men-tor. By eliciting students' preferences over mentor attributes, we find that female students are willing to trade off occupational match in order to access a female mentor. This willingness to pay for female men-tors declines to zero when information on mentor quality is provided. The evidence suggests that female students use mentor gender to alleviate information problems, but do not derive direct utility from it. We discuss the implications of these results for the design of initiatives that match on shared traits.(c) 2023 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.