We examine whether men and women of the same ability differ in their selection into a competitive environment. Participants in a laboratory experiment solve a real task, first under a non-competitive piece rate and then a competitive tournament incentive scheme. Although there are no gender differences in performance, men select the tournament twice as much as women when choosing their compensation scheme for the next performance. While seventy-three percent of the men select the tournament only thirty-five percent of the women make this choice. This gender gap in tournament entry is not explained by performance and factors such as risk and feedback aversion only play a negligible role. Instead the tournament-entry gap is driven by men being more overconfident and by gender differences in preferences for performing in a competition. The result is that women shy away from competition and men embrace it. * We thank Scott Kinross, who conducted all the experiments reported in this paper, for his excellent research assistance. We thank the editors and the referees who helped us improve the paper. We also

Many economists and biologists view cooperation as anomalous: animals (including humans) who pursue their own self-interest have superior survival odds to their altruistic or cooperative neighbors. However, in many situations there are substantial gains to the group that can achieve cooperation among its members, and to individuals who are members of those groups. For an individual, the key to successful cooperation is the ability to identify cooperative partners. The ability to signal and detect the intention to cooperate would be a very valuable skill for humans to posses. Smiling is frequently observed in social interactions between humans, and may be used as a signal of the intention to cooperate. However, given that humans have the ability to smile falsely, the ability to detect intentions may go far beyond the ability to recognize a smile. In the present study, we examine the value of a smile in a simple bargaining context. 120 subjects participate in a laboratory experiment cons...

The existence of a beauty premium in the labor market and the malefemale wage gap suggests that appearance can matter in the real world. We explore beauty and gender in a public goods experiment and find similar effects. We find a beauty premium, even though beautiful people contribute, on average, no more or less than others. The beauty premium, however, disappears when we provide information on individual contributions, and becomes a beauty penalty. Players seem to expect beautiful people to be more cooperative. Relative to these expectations, they appear more selfish, which in turn results in less cooperation by others. These appear to be clear examples of stereotyping. We also find a substantial benefit tobeing male, especially with information. This is primarily due to men being better “leaders.” Men tend to make large contributions, and people follow their example and give more in later rounds.

Recent research documents that while men are eager to compete, many women, even high performing ones, often shy away from competition. We examine experimentally whether affirmative action can entice more women to compete. When women are guaranteed equal representation among winners, we find that more women and fewer men enter competitions, and the response is larger than predicted by changes in the probability of winning. An explanation is that under affirmative action the competition becomes more gender specific and this causes both beliefs on rank and attitudes towards competition to change. The changes in competitive entry affect the costs of affirmative action. Based on ex-ante entry affirmative action is predicted to lower the performance requirement for women and result in reverse discrimination towards men. Interestingly this need not be the case when entry is not payoff maximizing, in fact it may not be necessary to lower the performance requirement for women to achieve a more diverse set of winners. We are grateful to the NSF and the Harvard Business School for generous support. We thank the

Recent experimental results indicate that women do not like competitive environments as much as men. This paper presents an experimental design giving participants the opportunity to enter a tournament as part of a team rather than alone. While a large and significant gender gap in entry in the Individual Tournament is found in line with the literature, no gender gap is found in entry in the Team Tournament. Women do not enter the tournament significantly more often when it is team-based but men enter significantly less when they are part of a team rather than alone. Changes in overconfidence as well as in risk, ambiguity and feedback aversion and the difference in men’s and women’s taste for competition all account for part of the disappearance of the gender gap in tournament entry. A remaining explanation is that men, and more precisely, high-performing dislike the uncertainty about their teammate’s ability more than women. The results suggest that men’s distaste for the Team Tournament is mainly caused by high-performing men not wanting to help a less deserving participant get higher payoffs.

Little is known about why some human beings make risky life-choices. This paper provides evidence that people‟s health decisions and addictive actions are influenced by the gender of their children. Having a daughter leads individuals-- in micro data from Great Britain and the United States-- to reduce their smoking, drinking, and drug-taking. The paper‟s results are consistent with the hypothesis that human beings „self-medicate ‟ when under stress.

This paper tests the effect of a matching mechanism on donations in a controlled field experiment. We match the donations of students at the University of Zurich who, each semester, have to decide whether they wish to contribute to two Social Funds. Our results support the hypothesis that a matching mechanism increases contributions to a public good. However, the effect depends on the extent to which the contributions are matched. Whereas a 25 percent increase of a donation does not increase the willingness to contribute, a 50 percent increase does have an effect. In addition, people need to be socially inclined to react to the matching mechanism. The field experiment provides some evidence suggesting that the matching mechanism crowds-out the intrinsic motivation of giving.

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Little is known about why some human beings make risky life-choices. This paper provides evidence that people‟s health decisions and addictive actions are influenced by the gender of their children. Having a daughter leads individuals-- in micro data from Great Britain and the United States-- to reduce their smoking, drinking, and drug-taking. The paper‟s results are consistent with the hypothesis that human beings „self-medicate ‟ when under stress.

1 We thank Susana Angkico of the UW registrar’s office for help with the data set, participants in a seminar at University of California – Davis for helpful comments, and Wolfram Latsch for helpful conversations. A substantial body of research suggests that economists are less generous than other professionals and that economics students are less generous than other students. We address this question using administrative data on donations to social programs by students at the University of Washington. Our data set allows us to track student donations and economics training over time in order to distinguish selection effects from indoctrination effects. We find that economics majors are less likely to donate than other students and that there is an indoctrination effect for non-majors but not for majors. Women majors and non-majors are less likely to contribute than comparable men. 2 I.