Chapter 57 Differences in the Economic Decisions of Men and Women: Experimental Evidence

Eckel, Catherine C.; Grossman, Philip J.

doi:10.1016/s1574-0722(07)00057-1

Cited by 357 publications

(273 citation statements)

References 15 publications

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“…The literature documents systematic differences between women and men in decision making (for surveys, see Eckel andGrossman 2008, Croson andGneezy 2009). Is there such a difference in the propensity to lie?…”

Section: Gender Differences In the Propensity To Liementioning

confidence: 99%

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White Lies

2012

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I n this paper we distinguish between two types of white lies: those that help others at the expense of the person telling the lie, which we term altruistic white lies, and those that help both others and the liar, which we term Pareto white lies. We find that a large fraction of participants are reluctant to tell even a Pareto white lie, demonstrating a pure lie aversion independent of any social preferences for outcomes. In contrast, a nonnegligible fraction of participants are willing to tell an altruistic white lie that hurts them a bit but significantly helps others. Comparing white lies to those where lying increases the liar's payoff at the expense of another reveals important insights into the interaction of incentives, lying aversion, and preferences for payoff distributions. Finally, in line with previous findings, women are less likely to lie when it is costly to the other side. Interestingly though, we find that women are more likely to tell an altruistic lie.

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Section: Gender Differences In the Propensity To Liementioning

confidence: 99%

“…It appears as if women have a higher cost of lying, but at the same time are more sensitive to another person's payoffs (for surveys of gender differences in social preferences, see Gneezy 2009, Eckel andGrossman 2008).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

White Lies

2012

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“…In our setting an agent's shame might be intensified by the fact that the guessed ranks also determine which agent is chosen and thereby whose actual performance affects the principal's expected payoff. 18 Evidence from psychology suggests that women experience emotions more intensely than men -according to self-reports (see e.g. Brody, 1997;and Grossman and Wood, 1993).…”

Section: Experimental Designmentioning

confidence: 99%

Do women have more shame than men? An experiment on self-assessment and the shame of overestimating oneself

Ludwig

Fellner-Röhling

Thoma

2017

European Economic Review

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We analyze how subjects' self-assessment depends on whether its accuracy is observable to others. We find that women downgrade their selfassessment given observability while men do not. Women avoid the shame they may have if others observe that they overestimated themselves. Men, however, do not seem to be similarly shame-averse. This gender difference may be due to different societal expectations: While we find that men are expected to be overconfident, women are not. Shame-aversion may explain recent findings that women shy away from competition, demanding jobs and wage negotiations, as entering these situations is a statement to be confident of one's ability.

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“…Two candidate explanations are that the pattern is due to women having (1) lower self-efficacy beliefs, or (2) greater risk aversion. In fact, empirical evidence shows that women exhibit systematically lower general self-efficacy than men (Scholz et al, 2002) and are more risk averse (Croson and Gneezy, 2009;Eckel and Grossman, 2008). 14 However, while self-efficacy and risk aversion can explain initial low goals for females, they cannot explain the fact that women set low goals systematically over the course of the nine periods, even after they have the chance to update their beliefs with full information about their own performance.…”

Section: Understanding the Gender Differencesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Paying with Self-Chosen Goals: Incentives and Gender Differences

2015

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To boost employees' performance, firms often offer monetary bonuses when production goals are reached. However, the evidence suggests that the particular level of a goal is critical to the effectiveness of this practice. Goals must be challenging yet achievable. Computing optimal goals when employees have private information about their own abilities is often not feasible for the firm. To solve this problem, we propose a compensation scheme in which workers set their own production goals. We provide a simple model of self-chosen goals and test its predictions in the laboratory. The evidence we find in the laboratory confirms our model's predictions for men, but not for women. Men exert greater effort under the self-chosen goal contract system than under a piece rate contract. In contrast, women perform worse under the self-chosen goal contract. Further analysis suggests that this is because women fail to set goals that are challenging enough, because they are less likely to update their goals to take into account their improving performance as they repeat the task. JEL: C91, C92, J16, J24.

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Chapter 57 Differences in the Economic Decisions of Men and Women: Experimental Evidence

Cited by 357 publications

References 15 publications

White Lies

White Lies

Do women have more shame than men? An experiment on self-assessment and the shame of overestimating oneself

Paying with Self-Chosen Goals: Incentives and Gender Differences

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