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There is ample evidence that women do not react to competition as men do and are less willing to enter a competition than men (e.g., Gneezy et al. (2003), Niederle and Vesterlund (2007)). In this paper, we use personality variables toto understand the underlying motives of women (and men) to enter a competition or avoid it. We use the Big Five personality factors (Goldberg (1981), McCrae and Costa JR (2003)), where especially neuroticism has been related to performance in achievement settings. We first test whether scores on the Big Five are related to performance in our experiment, and second how this is related to incentives. We can show that the sex difference in the willingness to enter a competition is mediated by neuroticism and further that neuroticism is negatively related to performance in competiton. This raises the possibility that those women who do not choose competititive incentives "know" that they should not.

Executives are increasingly facing various challenges associated with digitalisation, especially the simultaneous handling of many topics, loads of information flushing in via digital channels, rapid changes, and finding the right balance between the old and the new. Building on a growing body of research suggesting and systematising leadership skills, we conduct an online-survey with executives to investigate the connection between selected skills and the ability to cope with specific challenges. We find that a strong ability to think and act entrepreneurially, (self-)organisation and IT skills, a profound ability to motivate others, and a high degree of flexibility, commitment, and creativity are positively linked to the ability to cope with several digitalisation-related challenges. Surprisingly, being a strong team player does not seem to be necessarily advantageous. Moreover, many executives desire more calmness, which suggests that being able to decelerate is important in the digital age.

Standard-Nutzungsbedingungen:Die Dokumente auf EconStor dürfen zu eigenen wissenschaftlichen Zwecken und zum Privatgebrauch gespeichert und kopiert werden.Sie dürfen die Dokumente nicht für öffentliche oder kommerzielle Zwecke vervielfältigen, öffentlich ausstellen, öffentlich zugänglich machen, vertreiben oder anderweitig nutzen.Sofern die Verfasser die Dokumente unter Open-Content-Lizenzen (insbesondere CC-Lizenzen) zur Verfügung gestellt haben sollten, gelten abweichend von diesen Nutzungsbedingungen die in der dort genannten Lizenz gewährten Nutzungsrechte. Terms of use: Documents in University of HeidelbergAbstract. Growing interest in using personality variables in economic research leads to the question whether personality as measured by psychology is useful to predict economic behavior. Is it reasonable to expect values on personality scales to be predictive of behavior in economic games? It is undoubted that personality can influence large-scale economic outcomes. Whether personality variables can also be used to understand micro-behavior in economic games is however less clear. We discuss reasons in favor and against this assumption and test in our own experiment, whether and which personality factors are useful in predicting behavior in the trust or investment game. We can also use the trust game to understand how personality measures fare relatively in predicting behavior when situational constraints vary in strength. This approach can help economists to better understand what to expect from the inclusion of personality variables in their models and experiments, and where further research might be useful and needed.

No abstract