Can simple advice eliminate the gender gap in willingness to compete?

2018-11-15

2018-11-22

The effect of advice on tournament entry

The effect of advice on tournament entry is computed by subtracting the choice made prior to receiving advice (1-tournament, 0-piece rate) from the choice made after receiving advice.

Elicited beliefs, risk preferences, non-competitive price list, efficiency

See the pre-analysis plan

We aim to test whether advising women to compete more and advising men to compete less decreases the gender gap in willingness to compete. We use three different forms of advice and will investigate both the average effect across the three forms, and the effect of each form on its own.

Our experiment closely follows the design of Niederle and Vesterlund (2007). In round one, participants solve addition problems for four minutes under piece rate incentives (50 cents per correct answer). In round two, participants solve addition problems under tournament pay (1 Euro per correct answer if they beat another person from the session).

In round three, participants can choose between the two forms of payment prior to working on the task. After making their initial decision, we present participants with the advice that previous research has found that women compete too little and men compete too much, in the sense that women (men), on average, would have earned more money if they had been more (less) willing to compete. We then give participants the opportunity to revise their initial decision.

Participants then go through a belief elicitation task, a non-competitive price list and a risk preference elicitation. The belief elicitation task uses a variation of the Karni (2009) method to elicit participants' subjective probability of winning a tournament in round 2. The non-competitive price list task is taken from Van Veldhuizen (2018, working paper). The risk preference task is taken from Gneezy and Potters (1997). Finally, participants go through a brief questionnaire that includes gender, some additional demographics, a qualitative measure of confidence and risk preferences, and some open questions regarding the nature of the experiment.

An overview of the experiment is given below. We run three treatments that differ only in the content of the message in (4). The competitiveness treatment emphasizes that in previous research men compete too much and women too little. The risk preference treatment emphasizes that women take too few risks and men too many. And the belief treatment emphasizes that men are too confident and women not confident enough.

1. Round 1: Piece rate
2. Round 2: Tournament
3. Round 3a: Initial Choice between Piece rate and tournament (Control)
4. Treatment screen
5. Round 3b: Possibility to revise the choice from (3a)
6. Non-Competitive Price List
7. Belief Elicitation
8. Gneezy/Potters measure
9. Questionnaire (demographics, open questions, subjective risk/confidence measures)

References:
Gneezy, Uri, and Jan Potters. 1997. “An Experiment on Risk Taking and Evaluation Periods.” The Quarterly Journal of Economics 112 (2): 631–45. doi:10.1162/003355397555217.
Karni, Edi. 2009. “A Mechanism for Eliciting Probabilities.” Econometrica 77 (2): 603–6. doi:10.3982/ECTA7833.
Van Veldhuizen, R., 2018. "Gender Differences in Tournament Choices: Risk Preferences, Overconfidence, or Competitiveness?" Working paper.

Randomization done by the computer

Treatments are randomized within-session at the individual level.

No

360 (estimated)

360 (estimated). We will stop running sessions once we reach the desired sample size, provide we obtain data for at least 160 men and 160 women.

120 (estimated)

The minimum detectable effect size is a 15 percentage point difference between men and women in the effect of advice. This gives us a power of at least .838; more details are presented in the attached power calculations file.

As a recent literature has demonstrated, men and women differ in their willingness to sort into competitive environments. In particular, men are more willing than women to compete. We investigate whether it is possible to reduce the gender gap in willingness to compete through an information intervention that informs participants of the gap and advises them about the potential earnings implications. We find that this simple information intervention reduced the gender gap, both in a laboratory study at a German university and in a field study with Swedish high school students. Whereas some participants (primarily high-performing women) benefited from the intervention, others lost out. We discuss the implications for efficiency and policy.

Dany Kessel, Johanna Mollerstrom, Roel van Veldhuizen, Can simple advice eliminate the gender gap in willingness to compete?, European Economic Review, Volume 138, 2021, 103777, ISSN 0014-2921, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.euroecorev.2021.103777. (https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0014292121001306)

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0014292121001306