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

1 Over the past 60 years there have been substantial improvements in the college preparation of female students, and the college gender gap has changed dramatically. Goldin, Katz and Kuziemko (2006) show that female high school students now outperform male students in most subjects, and in particular on verbal test scores. The ratio of male to female college graduates has not only decreased, but reversed itself, and the majority of college graduates is now female. The gender gap in mathematics has also changed. The number of math and science courses taken by female high school students has increased and now the mean and standard deviation in performance on math test scores are only slightly larger for males than for females. Despite minor differences in mean performance, Hedges and Nowell (1995) show that many more boys than girls perform at the right tail of the distribution. This gender gap has been documented for a series of math tests including the AP calculus test, the mathematics SAT, and the quantitative portion of the GRE. Over the past 20 years the fraction of males to females who score in the top five percent in high school math has remained constant at two to one (Xie and Shauman, 2003). Examining students who scored 800 on the math SAT in 2007, Ellison and

Using a controlled experiment, we examine the role of nurture in explaining the stylized fact that women shy away from competition. Our subjects (students just under 15 years of age) attend publicly-funded single-sex and coeducational schools. We find robust differences between the competitive choices of girls from single-sex and coed schools. Moreover, girls from single-sex schools behave more like boys even when randomly assigned to mixed-sex experimental groups. Thus it is untrue that the average female avoids competitive behaviour more than the average male. This suggests that observed gender differences might re‡ect social learning rather than inherent gender traits.

Acknowledgements: For fine research assistance, and valuable discussions, we are indebted

*The alphabetical ordering of the authors denotes equal co-authorship. We gratefully

Evidence from social psychology suggests that agents process information about their own ability in a biased manner. This evidence has motivated exciting research in behavioral economics, but has also garnered critics who point out that it is potentially consistent with standard Bayesian updating. We implement a direct experimental test. We study a large sample of 656 undergraduate students, tracking the evolution of their beliefs about their own relative performance on an IQ test as they receive noisy feedback from a known data-generating process. Our design lets us repeatedly measure the complete relevant belief distribution incentive-compatibly. We find that subjects (1) place approximately full weight on their priors, but (2) are asymmetric, over-weighting positive feedback relative to negative, and (3) conservative, updating too little in response to both positive and negative signals. These biases are substantially less pronounced in a placebo experiment where ego is not at stake. We also find that (4) a substantial portion of subjects are averse to receiving information about their ability, and that (5) less confident subjects are causally more likely to be averse. We unify these phenomena by showing that they all arise naturally in a

This paper studies the determinants of college major choice using an experimentally generated panel of beliefs, obtained by providing students with information on the true population distribution of various major-specific characteristics. Students logically revise their beliefs in response to the information, and their subjective beliefs about future major choice are associated with beliefs about (self and spouse’s) earnings and ability. We estimate a rich model of college major choice. While earnings are a significant determinant of major choice, tastes –w hich are heterogeneous – are the dominant factor in the choice of major. We also investigate gender differences in major choice.

Abstract: Gender differences in “competitiveness, ” previously documented in laboratory experiments, are hypothesized to play a role in a wide array of economic outcomes. The current paper provides evidence of competition-aversion in a natural setting somewhere between the simplicity of a laboratory experiment and the full complexity and ambiguity of a labor market. The “State Street Mile ” race offers both male and female participants a choice between two different levels of competition. Large, systematic age and gender differences are observed in the relationship between true ability and the decision to enter the more competitive race. Overall, qualified women and older runners are far less likely than qualified young men to enter a competitive race with cash prizes. However, the fastest young women unanimously enter the competitive race. Therefore, while we confirm age and gender differences in competitiveness in our field setting, the economic consequences to capable young women are rather small.

Competition is a cornerstone of economic life. Some environments are, however, more competitive than others and individuals are often confronted with the decision whether to self-select into a competitive environment. An important example is occupational choice: a self-employed lawyer is in constant competition for clients, whereas a lawyer working as a civil servant in a public authority is not. Likewise, some people vigorously compete for promotion to better paid jobs associated with a high prestige while others don’t. Understanding who self-selects into competitive environments and who shies away from them is thus important. In this paper, we test the hypothesis that individuals with a preference for egalitarian outcomes are more reluctant to self-select into competitive environments. Our hypothesis is based on (i) the observation that payoff inequalities among winners and losers arise as a natural by-product of competition; and (ii) the empirical literature showing that a nonnegligible share of children and adults is willing to incur costs to reduce earnings inequalities (see, e.g., Christopher Dawes et al. 2007; Ernst Fehr, Helen Bernhard, and Bettina Rockenbach 2008). We analyze data from several economic experiments implemented in a household survey study with mothers of preschool children. We

Competition is a cornerstone of economic life because it promotes efficiency in various contexts. Individuals are often confronted with the decision whether to self-select into a competitive environment. An important example is occupational choice: a self-employed lawyer is in constant competition for clients, whereas a lawyer working as a civil servant in a public authority is not. Understanding who self-selects into competitive environments and who shies away from them is thus important. In this paper, we test the hypothesis that individuals with a preference for egalitarian outcomes are more reluctant to self-select into competitive environments. Our hypothesis is driven by (i) the observation that payoff inequalities among winners and losers arise as a natural by-product of competition and (ii) the empirical literature showing that a non-negligible fraction of people is willing to incur costs to reduce earnings inequalities (see, e.g., Christopher Dawes et al., 2007, or Ernst Fehr and Klaus Schmidt, 2006). We analyze data from several economic experiments implemented in a household survey study with mothers of preschool children. We measure competitiveness by giving our subjects the choice between competing in a tournament or receiving a piece rate for a real