Beauty and the feast: Examining the effect of beauty on earnings using restaurant tipping data

This paper looks at the effect of beauty on earnings using restaurant tipping data. Customers were surveyed as they left a set of five Virginia restaurants about the dining experience, their server, and themselves, including about their tip and their server's beauty and productivity. I find that attractive servers earn approximately $1261 more per year in tips than unattractive servers, the primary driver of which is female customers tipping attractive females more than unattractive females. Potential explanations of this earnings gap are drawn from both the labor and experimental economics literatures, the most compelling of which is customer taste-based discrimination.