Leader Gender, Participation, and the Quality of Contributions in Groups

Last registered on July 23, 2026
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Pre-Trial

Trial Information

General Information

Title
Leader Gender, Participation, and the Quality of Contributions in Groups
RCT ID
AEARCTR-0018814
Initial registration date
July 17, 2026

Initial registration date is when the trial was registered.

It corresponds to when the registration was submitted to the Registry to be reviewed for publication.

First published
July 23, 2026, 8:00 AM EDT

First published corresponds to when the trial was first made public on the Registry after being reviewed.

Locations

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Primary Investigator

Name
yangfei lin
Affiliation
ZheJiang University
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Other Primary Investigator(s)

PI Name
Brit Grosskopf
PI Affiliation
University of Exeter
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Additional Trial Information

Status
In development
Start date
2026-07-24
End date
2026-10-31
Keywords
Behavior, Gender
Additional Keywords
JEL code(s)
Secondary IDs
Prior work
This trial does not extend or rely on any prior RCTs.
Abstract
We investigate how leaders' gender affects group members' willingness to contribute their ideas and their performance in a series of real-effort tasks using a randomised online experiment. Participants will be assigned to groups of three with one leader and two group members, with each group member responsible for completing a series of tasks and reporting their willingness to answer for the group in each real-effort task.
First, we will examine whether participants' willingness to answer for the group is affected by their leader's gender. Second, we will examine whether the quality of their answers is affected by their leader's gender. Third, we are interested in the quality gaps across treatments at different levels of willingness. Finally, we will examine whether participants' confidence in their answers affects their willingness across treatments. We will also examine whether the effort spent by the group members is affected by their leader's gender.
The goal of this project is to study how a leader's gender affects the willingness to contribute ideas, the quality of ideas, and the effort put forward.
External Link(s)

Registration Citation

Citation
Grosskopf, Brit and yangfei lin. 2026. "Leader Gender, Participation, and the Quality of Contributions in Groups." AEA RCT Registry. July 23. https://doi.org/10.1257/rct.18814-1.0
Sponsors & Partners
Experimental Details

Interventions

Intervention(s)
Intervention Start Date
2026-07-24
Intervention End Date
2026-10-31

Primary Outcomes

Primary Outcomes (end points)
We are interested in these outcome variables from the male/female group members:
1. Self-reported willingness (from 1 (weak) to 5 (strong)) to have their own answers become the group’s answers in each task.
2. Performance in each task.
3. Participants' performance when they report a strong (= 5) or relatively strong (>=4) willingness to have their own answers become the group's answers.
4. Participants' performance when they report a weak (= 1) or relatively weak (<=2) willingness to have their own answers become the group's answers.
5. The effort put into each task.

We will compare these variables across treatments.
Primary Outcomes (explanation)
Performance in each task is a measure of the quality of ideas. The effort is measured by time, correctness, and the number of attempts to answer, depending on the task.

Secondary Outcomes

Secondary Outcomes (end points)
1. Confidence in each task.
2. Contribution in a one-shot public goods game.
Secondary Outcomes (explanation)
1. The confidence measurements range from 0 to 10 in each task.
2. The contribution in a one-shot public goods game ranges from 0 to 20.

Experimental Design

Experimental Design
We conduct a randomised online experiment, and participants will be randomly assigned to groups of three, containing one leader and two group members. We investigate how the gender of the leader affects the quality of ideas, effort and willingness to contribute in group tasks.
Experimental Design Details
Not available
Randomization Method
We randomly assigned participants to different treatments using the Qualtrics randomiser.
Randomization Unit
Individual
Was the treatment clustered?
No

Experiment Characteristics

Sample size: planned number of clusters
We plan to recruit 600 gender-balanced participants as group members after exclusion, and 120 gender-balanced participants for the leader selection.

We include comprehension questions in the group-member experiment, and participants who fail to pass them on two attempts will not continue. We also include an attention-check question after participants have finished all the tasks. We also employ some AI detection tools provided by Prolific. The detection tools have 4 ratings (High, Mixed, Low, No results). We will exclude those rated Low from our sample and manually review those rated Mixed. If those Mixed responses are reviewed as Non-human generated, they will also be excluded. Participants who do not complete the experiment will also be excluded.
Sample size: planned number of observations
600 individual observations per task; 1,800 observations when the three task-level outcomes are pooled (clustered at the individual level when pooled).
Sample size (or number of clusters) by treatment arms
200 in male leader treatment; 200 in female leader treatment; 200 in no gender information treatment

Minimum detectable effect size for main outcomes (accounting for sample design and clustering)
Supporting Documents and Materials
IRB

Institutional Review Boards (IRBs)

IRB Name
University of Exeter Business School Research Ethics Committee
IRB Approval Date
2026-06-08
IRB Approval Number
eUEBS002788 2.1
Analysis Plan