Reinhard Selten Award 2022

During the 2022 Annual Meeting of the Verein für Socialpolitik, Katharina Brütt und Huaiping were awarded the Reinhard Selten Prize (Young Author Best Paper Award) of the year 2022. Thomas Siedler (Head of the Program Commission 2022) praised the paper as outstanding during the Annual Meeting of the Association.

"Pitfalls of Pay Transparency: Evidence from the Lab and the Field"

In this paper, Katharina Brütt and Huaiping Yuan use a natural experiment and an online experiment to investigate whether wage transparency has an impact on the gender pay gap.
First, they take a closer look at the introduction of a wage transparency policy in Germany in 2017 ("Gesetz zur Förderung der Transparenz von Entgeltstrukturen"). The empirical results of difference-in-differences estimations find that this law has no impact on the gender wage gap. Second, they use an experiment to examine whether and how the failure of this wage transparency policy depends on the endogenous or exogenous provision of wage information and/or the absence of performance information. The paper makes important contributions to the gender wage gap literature and to a very relevant social and economic policy issue.

Every year at its Annual Meeting, the Verein für Socialpolitik awards the Reinhard Selten Prize (Young Author Best Paper Award), worth €3,000, for papers that stand out in particular for their originality, significance of the research question and clean methodology. The award is named after Reinhard Selten, the only German-speaking Nobel laureate to-date in economics, who was honored for his work in the field of game theory - in particular his development of the concepts of subgame perfection and the “trembling”-hand perfect equilibrium.