Gender Bias or Profit Maximization? An Economics Experiment on the Gap in Availability and Cost of Female Avatars in Mobile Games
Date
2018-07
Authors
Journal Title
Journal ISSN
Volume Title
Publisher
Department of Applied Economics and Statistics, University of Delaware, Newark, DE.
Abstract
The introduction of smart phones, such as the iPhone, and associated applications (also known as apps) have established a new platform for gaming. Industry reports suggest that upwards of 60 percent of the players of these games are females. However, critics have noted that these apps tend to be biased against female representation. In 2015, a 12-year-old girl published her research in The Washington Post highlighting this gender difference. She found 98 percent of top “Endless Running Games” apps offered boy characters (often referred to as avatars), but only 46 percent offered girl avatars. Even more striking was that 90 percent of the boy avatars were offered for free, but only 15 percent offered girls avatars for free. In fact, while the average app cost just $0.26, the average cost of purchasing a girl avatar was $7.53. Some have drawn from this evidence that the app development industry is biased against women, while others counter that this by arguing that a smart, profit-maximizing industry could simply be seeking to profit by exploiting differences in preferences between boys and girls – in other words, the app developers are not biased, they just provide their customers with what they want. Our study uses experimental economics methodology involving actual monetary choices for real avatars in game situations to test these competing explanations. This framed field experiment involved 214 children, aged 7 to 14. Results suggest that both boys and girls have strong preferences to use avatars that have the same gender while they play. Willingness to play as another gender was present, but essentially none of the participants wanted to pay to play as another gender. These results find little difference in preferences between boys and girls and thus there is little evidence of strategic profit maximizing to explain a phenomenon that continues to look like basic gender bias in the gaming industry.
Description
Keywords
Gender preference, Video games, Gender bias, Field experiments, Child behavior
Citation
Jennings, A. and M.K. Messer, M.K. 2018. “Gender Bias or Profit Maximization? An Economics Experiment on the Gap in Availability and Cost of Female Avatars in Mobile Games” Applied Economics and Statistics Research Report, University of Delaware, RR18-03.