Gender differences in altruism and the price of altruism: evidence from restaurant tips

ABSTRACT

This paper examines gender differences in altruism using restaurant tipping data. More specifically, we investigate how male and female customer percentage tips vary as the price of altruism (bill size) varies and find that females tip more than males when altruism is cheap, males tip more than females when altruism is expensive, and that females are more responsive to the price of altruism.

KEYWORDS:

• Gender
• altruism
• generosity
• dictator
• tip

JEL CLASSIFICATION:

• C93
• J16

Acknowledgments

This paper is dedicated to my late mother, Sissy Parrett, who assisted with data collection and whose altruism was boundless.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

¹ Per Harrison and List (2004), restaurant tipping is a natural field experiment because subjects (customers) engage in a task they would naturally undertake and are unaware they are participating in an experiment.

² Azar (2020) reports that the restaurant tipping norm ranges from 15 to 25% of the bill.

³ Andreoni and Vesterlund (2001) first suggested this, reporting that a draft of Conlin, Lynn, and O’Donahue (2003) reveals that as a percentage of the bill men tip better for small bills, women tip better for large bills, and men are more responsive to bill size. However, these findings neither control for the customer’s percentage tip norm belief nor appear in the published paper.

⁴ Average tip in our study (19%) is consistent with current restaurant tipping practices found in Azar (2020).

⁵ Surveys available upon request.

⁶ A tip of, say, 15% was taken as ln(15). Heteroskedasticity concerns drive our dependent variable specification. We cannot reject the null hypothesis of homoskedasticity (Cook-Weisberg test) in any of our Table 2 ln(Percent Tip) specifications (p = 0.1096, p = 0.4570, p = 0.7264, respectively), but reject it when using Percent Tip in these specifications (p < 0.001, p < 0.001, p < 0.001, respectively). Using Percent Tip in Table 2, however, does yield similar findings.

⁷ Excluding fixed effects, Percent Tip Norm, or both from our analyses produces similar findings.

Additional information

Funding

Funding was provided by the National Science Foundation (SBE-0241935).