How Well Do Women Sell?

This paper documents a gender revenue gap arising when individuals sell personal belongings such as china, jewelry, paintings, toys, and furniture. We study a novel data set that is hand-collected from a popular TV show which is watched every weekday by more than 2 million people. The median appraisal value of an item is 500 euros and the total value of all items sold is about 1,490,000 euros. The sales occur through an English auction during which sellers can try to influence the outcome and post-auction negotiation with the highest bidder is possible. After controlling for a host of covariates, women lose on average about 8.5\% compared to men. We document heterogeneity across items: Women perform better if they sell items that are congruent with the female gender role or items where the value is easier to determine (e.g., through the value of the raw material). We further show that the relative performance of women depends on both seller characteristics (age, education, attractiveness, optimism, sentiment) and dealer-team characteristics (generosity, activeness, pushiness, and average age of male dealers). Finally, we provide evidence that female teams perform significantly better than single females. In fact, they do as well as single males