Pricing competition: a new laboratory measure of gender differences in the willingness to compete

Abstract

Experiments have demonstrated that men are more willing to compete than women. We develop a new instrument to "price" willingness to compete. We find that men value a $2.00 winner-take-all payment significantly more (about $0.28 more) than women; and that women require a premium (about 40 percent) to compete. Our new instrument is more sensitive than the traditional binary-choice instrument, and thus, enables us to identify relationships that are not identifiable using the traditional binary-choice instrument. We find that subjects who are the most willing to compete have high ability, higher GPA's (men), and take more STEM courses (women). 1 NV (2007) inspired a series of laboratory experiments to test the robustness and limits of their seminal finding. For example, researchers have (a) manipulated subjects' beliefs by providing subjects with feedback regarding their relative performance (e.g., Cason, Masters, & Sheremeta, 2010; Wozniak, Harbaugh & Mayr, 2014); (b) used tasks that are not stereotypically-male (e.g., Grosse & Riener, 2010; Kamas & Preston, 2009; Wozniak et al., 2014); (c) explicitly controlled for risk preferences (e.g., Cason et. al., 2010; Wozniak et al., 2014); and (d) employed proportional winner-take-all payments (e.g., Cason et. al., 2010). While this body of research has illustrated circumstances under which NV (2007) does not hold, the main finding (that men are significantly more willing than women to compete in stereotypically-male tasks) has been replicated repeatedly (see NV (2011) for a thorough review of the literature).

Do Gender‐variant Preferences for Competition Persist in the Absence of Performance?

“…All three studies find that the magnitude of men's willingness‐to‐compete is greater than women's and that the new measures are more informative than the binary‐choice measure. The new willingness‐to‐compete measure validated in Ifcher and Zarghamee (forthcoming) is utilized herein to examine a disparate research question: whether performing is necessary and sufficient to generate gender‐variant preferences for competition. As such, the study of Ifcher and Zarghamee (forthcoming) does not consider the data generated from the task without agency (described in Section III.D) and restricts the sample to the 108 (of 208) subjects that completed the summation task first.…”

“…In Task 4, subjects were offered the payment scheme from Ifcher and Zarghamee (forthcoming) that measures the willingness to compete along a continuum. Specifically, subjects were offered a series of choices between PR payments (ranging from 0% to 100% of the WTA payment) and the WTA payment.…”

Bacon Brains: Video Games for Teaching the Science of Addiction

“…There are, however, some exceptions. Females are more willing to compete against other women (Gupta, Poulsen, & Villeval, 2013) and at tasks at which they feel they excel (Ifcher & Zarghamee, 2015). Overall, however, the net result is that fewer women enter male-dominated fields.…”

Willingness to compete: Between‐ and within‐gender comparisons

“…Ifcher and Zarghamee, (), use an MPL and reported that out of 151 subjects, 23 had irrational reactions (shifted between the tournament and the piece‐rate more than once). It is true that by “forcing” rationality, we might miss some of the natural errors humans make, which can yield some interesting information for the researcher.…”

“…Ifcher and Zarghamee, () report a Spearman rank correlation = 0.61 ( p = 0.00) and argue that this is “suggesting that both instruments are measuring a similar parameter.”…”