Gender Differences and Dynamics in Competition: The Role of Luck

Abstract

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. In a real effort experiment with repeated competition we find striking differences in how the work effort of men and women responds to previous wins and losses. For women, losing per se is detrimental to productivity, but for men, a loss impacts negatively on productivity only when the prize at stake is big enough. Responses to luck are more persistent and explain more of the variation in behavior for women, and account for about half of the gender performance gap in our experiment. Our findings shed new light on why women may be less inclined to pursue competition-intensive careers. Terms of use: Documents in EconStor may

The Impact of Losing in a Competition on the Willingness to Seek Further Challenges

“…This result is in line with Gill and Prowse (2010) who, using a series of competitions, find that the negative effect of losing in a competition on performance in a subsequent competition is stronger for women. While men react to losing by becoming more challenge seeking and women react by lowering their performance, both these reactions have similar negative effects on the likelihood of success and expected earnings.…”

“…Finally, Gill and Prowse (2010) also detect a gender difference whereby following a loss, women reduce their effort independent of the size of the prize whereas men only reduce their effort if the prize they failed to win was large enough.…”

“…1 However, the economics literature on the effects of winning and losing in a tournament on subsequent decisions is small. Most relevant to this study is Gill and Prowse (2010) who find that in a series of twoperson competitions, people tend to reduce their effort provision following a loss. Apicella, Dreber, and Möllerström (2014), on the other hand, find no effect of the outcome of a rock-paper-scissors competition on subsequent willingness to take risk.…”

How Uncertainty and Ambiguity in Tournaments Affect Gender Differences in Competitive Behavior

“…2009;Gill and Prowse, 2014;Almås et al, 2016) and that women shy away from competition much more often than men (seminal paper by Niederle and Vesterlund, 2007; see also Booth and Nolen, 2012;Datta Gupta et al, 2013;Brandts et al, 2014;Buser et al 2014;Sutter and Glätzle-Rützler, 2015;Flory et al, 2015;Saccardo et al 2017).2 Since firms often use tournament payment and promotion schemes (Eriksson, 1999;Bognanno, 2001), a lower inclination of women towards competition can help explain to some extent why they are less often promoted and end up with lower wages.3 Providing empirical evidence in this vein, McGee et al (2015) show on the basis of US data that women are less likely than men to be remunerated with a competitive compensation package and that this can explain part of the wage gap between the two genders.…”

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“…A number of authors have investigated competition among employees, (e.g., Haan, Offerman & Sloof, 2015;Lazear, 1989;Van Ours & Ridder, 1995), and as a result, the motivational factors in such competitions have been revealed: for instance, winning prizes. In this regard, Gill and Prowse (2014) found that competition in a promoted tournament for winning a prize is a ubiquitous phenomenon in the labour market. Delfgaauw, Dur, Sol and Verbeke (2013), by observing 128 Dutch retail chain stores, deduced that conducting a sales competition among employees has a significant effect on sales growth, and that employees are not motivated only by the aim of gaining more rewards, but also, by winning the competition, as predicted by so-called tournament theory.…”