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This paper empirically examines how consumers react when a company marks a product with a gay label. The company under scrutiny is one of the largest video game developers in the world, and the labeled product is a popular video game character. We use a regression discontinuity design to exploit the quasi-experimental setting. The main finding was significant drop in demand for this character and a return to previous levels after approximately 3 months. Possible mechanisms and dynamics were explored by analyzing demand for other characters and by surveying consumers. The results are consistent after performing robustness checks based on grid search, subsampling, and placebo tests.

[This corrects the article DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0240811.].

Societies are increasingly multicultural and diverse, consisting of members who migrated from various other countries. However, immigrants and ethnic minorities often face discrimination in the form of fewer opportunities for labor and housing, as well as limitations on interactions in other social domains. Using mock email accounts with typical native-sounding and foreign-sounding names, we contacted 23,020 amateur football clubs in 22 European countries, asking to participate in a training session. Response rates differed across countries and were, on average, about 10% lower for foreign-sounding names. The present field experiment reveals discrimination against ethnic minority groups, uncovering organizational deficiencies in a system trusted to foster social interactions.

This paper examines the issue of employee discrimination after a political crisis: the annexation of Crimea. The annexation, which resulted in a political crisis in Russian-Ukrainian relations, is a setting which allows us to test if a bilateral political issue caused employee discrimination. We use a quasi-experimental approach to examine how the political crisis influenced participation in major sports leagues in Russia and Ukraine. The results show that the employment conditions significantly worsened since the Crimea crisis started.

Background/ObjectivesThe study considers the problem of the inclusion of people with obesity in the context of the growing role of computer-based work. Negative stereotypes about people with obesity still hold even when they are irrelevant in tasks that require little physical activity.Subjects/MethodsUsing data from the realm of competitive video gaming (eSports) and image recognition-based metric of body mass index metric derived from artificial intelligence, we examine the individual performance depending on weight. The sample includes 821 players and 127,533 player performance observations.ResultsFor shorter tasks, individuals with normal weight performed better than individuals with obesity. For longer tasks, however, people with Class III (severe) obesity outperformed all others, and their advantage increased with task duration.ConclusionsOur findings shed light on an understanding of how actually body features are related to objective individual performance in a competitive context.

Today’s societies increasingly consist of members who migrated from other countries and regions, and their functioning depends heavily on integrating their diverse members. Interactions with the local population through social activities enhance integration. Despite its relevance, however, previous research has largely overlooked the role of the local population in social integration. This paper introduces an objective method for analyzing access to social activities. Switzerland includes diverse native groups, who differ in culture and language, and a high percentage of foreigners. Applications were sent by email to amateur Swiss football clubs, asking if it is possible to join a training session. The applications differed only in the contact name. Individuals with foreign names, as well as individuals with Swiss names from some other native groups, received significantly fewer responses. The findings are relevant for governing institutions and policy-makers. Researchers who study social integration may find the novel method used here of considerable interest.

This study introduces a graphical methodology to the analysis of competitive balance in sports, which is prospective in nature and captures more subtleties than commonly-used retrospective measures. Thus, this study examines the evolution of competitive balance in Major League Soccer from 2004 to 2015, including the potential role played by certain league policies. For this purpose, we use prospective measures, based on probabilities that are extracted from betting odds (ex-ante) and on retrospective indicators (ex-post). The results differ slightly when analyzing competitive balance and predicting attendance. However, the graphical measures provide additional practical information about the characteristics of competitive balance.

This article develops a game-theoretical model to analyze the effect of subsidies on player salaries, competitive balance, club profits, and welfare. Within this model, fan demand depends on win percentage, competitive balance, and aggregate talent. The results show that if a large-market club receives a subsidy and fans have a relatively strong preference for aggregate talent, compared to competitive balance and own team winning percentage, club profits and welfare increase for both clubs. If the small-market club is subsidized, a small subsidy increases competitive balance and player salaries of both clubs.

In this paper, we investigate how individuals evaluate human and large langue models generated responses to popular questions when the source of the content is either concealed or disclosed. Through a controlled field experiment, participants were presented with a set of questions, each accompanied by a response generated by either a human or an AI. In a randomized design, half of the participants were informed of the response's origin while the other half remained unaware. Our findings indicate that, overall, participants tend to prefer AI-generated responses. However, when the AI origin is revealed, this preference diminishes significantly, suggesting that evaluative judgments are influenced by the disclosure of the response's provenance rather than solely by its quality. These results underscore a bias against AI-generated content, highlighting the societal challenge of improving the perception of AI work in contexts where quality assessments should be paramount.

A rich literature shows that ethnic discrimination is an omnipresent and highly persistent phenomenon. Little is known, however, about how to reduce discrimination. This study reports the results of a large-scale field experiment we ran together with the Norwegian Football Federation. The federation sent an email to a random selection of about 500 amateur soccer coaches, pointing towards the important role that soccer can play in promoting inclusivity and reducing racism in society and calling on the coaches to be open to all interested applicants. Two weeks later, we sent fictitious applications to join an amateur club, using either a nativesounding or a foreign-sounding name, to the same coaches and to a random selection of about 500 coaches who form the control group. In line with earlier research, we find that applications from people with a native-sounding name receive significantly more positive responses than applications from people with a foreign-sounding name. Surprisingly and unintentionally, the email from the federation substantially increased rather than decreased this gap. Our study underlines the importance of running field experiments to check whether well-intended initiatives are effective in reducing discrimination.