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1. Differences w/ Male & Female Competitiveness
   

   Player Chronicle -- Posted on May 21 2009

   I found a piece of an informational research paper. I just copied and pasted. I didn't change a thing. JUST READ!
   
   Men and women differ in many important respects, such as having different jobs and being in different occupations. They also work under different incentive systems, with females considerably more often than men working under piece rate pay schemes.2 Relatively few women hold top corporate positions, although in many countries women’s educational attainment now exceed men’s3. Women are also less likely to run for elections and they represent a low percentage in national parliaments.
   In explaining these and other observed gender differences, economists have offered supply and demand side explanations. Supply side explanations usually emphasize the role of women in the family, which affects their human capital investment and career choices (Mincer and Polachek, 1974; Polachek, 1981). Demand side explanations focus on employer and employee discrimination. We refer the reader to Altonji and Blank (1999) for a review of these theories, Neumark, Blank, and Van Nort (1996) or Goldin and Rouse (2000) for empirical evidence.
   This paper investigates the extent to which these and similar observations can be explained by men and women differing in their competitiveness. By competitiveness we mean the propensity to prefer to be rewarded based on relative performance (such as a tournament), rather than being rewarded on the basis of one’s own performance only (such as a piece rate).
   We set up a laboratory experiment, in which each subject, before performing a task, is matched with a co-participant and then chooses between being paid by a piece rate payment scheme or being paid by a tournament payment scheme. Once he has chosen
   2 See Goldin (1986), Brown (1990), Heywood, Siebert and Wei (1997), Heywood and Jirjahn(2002), and Jirjahn and Stephan (2004).
   3 See, for example, Bertrand and Hallock (2001) and Blau, Simpson, and Anderson (1998).
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   his payment scheme, the subject learns his co-participant’s payment scheme choice, and then they perform a real task, as in Gneezy, Niederle and Rustichini (2003). If the subject chooses the piece rate payment scheme, he gets a certain payment per unit of output, so his reward depends on his own performance only. If he chooses the tournament payment scheme, he gets a higher payment per unit output, but only if he performs better than his co-participant, otherwise he receives a low payment. If the co-participant chose the piece-rate, a subject who chooses the tournament gets the high payment per unit of output.
   Our design captures, we believe, the essential properties of many competitive situations, such as: deciding whether to choose a low-pay-low-risk or a high-pay-high-risk job or occupation; deciding whether or not to exert effort to be promoted or to apply for a better paid job; and deciding whether or not to take part in a contest or election, in order to get a prize or a mandate. Our experiment contributes to a supply side explanation for observed male and female differences in such situations. There is no role for demand side factors, such as employer and customer discrimination – these are controlled away.
   In the experiment, 60% of men, but only 34% of women, choose the tournament payment scheme. To check the robustness of this gender gap, we create an additional treatment where we increase the expected monetary payoff from the tournament relative to that of the piece rate. Both men and women choose the tournament more frequently, but men still choose the tournament significantly more than women. Thus males and females react to changes in the economic incentives. It is not the case that ‘women just don’t like to compete’. But the gender gap in competitiveness persists.
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   What causes these observed gender differences in payment scheme choice? Men and women can differ in their degree of risk aversion (see, for example, Charness and Gneezy, 2004 and Croson and Gneezy, 2004). Second, men and women might have different beliefs about their ability relative to that of their co-participant. Third, men and women can hold different beliefs about their co-participant’s payment scheme choices. If an individual thinks that her co-participant will choose the piece rate, she should choose the tournament even if she believes she could be worse at performing the task than the co-participant.
   A key feature of our experiment is that we provide a subject with information about her co-participant’s gender. This allows us to see whether males and females hold different beliefs about relative ability and about other people’s payment scheme, and whether these beliefs vary with the co-participant’s gender.4 We can then measure the impact of risk aversion and the impact of these beliefs on male and female behavior.
   We find that risk does not matter for men when they choose their payment scheme. But the women who choose the tournament are significantly less risk averse than those who chose the piece rate. Second, while beliefs about the co-participant’s payment scheme choice do not influence womens’ payment scheme choice, it affects men’s, and the effect depends on the opponent’s gender. Men are more likely to choose the tournament when matched with a man than when matched with a woman. And when matched with a woman, the more likely the man believes the woman is to choose the tournament, the more likely he himself is to choose the tournament. Third, both men and women tend to believe that males are better at the task than women, and the typical
   4 The influence of other people’s gender has mainly been studied in bargaining situations (see, for example, Ayres and Siegelman, 1995 and Eckel and Grossman, 2001), in prisoner’s dilemma games (Rapoport and Chammah, 1965), or in coordination games (Holm, 2000).
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   man and woman believe they are better at performing the task than the average subject. But neither men nor women condition their payment scheme choice on these beliefs about relative ability.
   In our experiment a subject is exogenously matched with a man or a woman, i.e., people can not influence the gender distribution of their group. But if we increase the subjects’ control over their environment by allowing subjects to choose their co-participant, this may cause the tournament payment scheme to appear less risky and more attractive. To investigate this, we ran a treatment where subjects could choose to interact with a male or a female co-participant before making their other decisions as before.5 Interestingly, we observe that women are more willing to compete than when the pairing procedure is exogenous, both when they choose to be paired with a woman and with a man, although only the first difference is marginally significant. One likely explanation is that women may become more confident about competing per se against a female when they have better control over the environment.
   An analysis of how well men and women performed the task itself also reveals interesting gender differences. First, while men are in general somewhat better at the task than women, this difference is significant only when a subject is the only one to have chosen the tournament, i.e., the co-participant chose the piece rate. Second, while the performance of women does not vary significantly with the payment scheme chosen, the effort of men increases as soon they have chosen the tournament. Moreover, when both a man and his co-participant chose the tournament, if the co-participant is a woman the man works significantly less than if he is confronted with a man. We interpret this as an expression of chivalry (see also e.g. Eckel and Grossman, 2001). In summary, males
   5 Slonim (2005) is to our knowledge the only other experiment where subjects, in a trust game, can choose to interact with men or with women.
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   condition their decisions on other peope’s gender not only when making their payment scheme choice, but also when actually performing the task.
   Our results show that men and women differ in the considerations that influence their behavior. Women are primarily ‘internally’ oriented when choosing their payment scheme: they base their payment scheme choice on their attitude to risk. Men, on the other hand, are ‘externally’ oriented and seem to be influenced by a norm or convention according to which they ‘must’ compete against other men and ‘must’ compete against women who are thought to compete.

   
   

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WHiTEGiRRRL has 1 comment on this chronicle.

1. JackDaniels624
   Posted On May 22 2009

   I didn't read the whole thing (yet) but I must say...Isn't psychology fun?