Pricing Competition: A New Laboratory Measure of Gender Differences in the Willingness to Compete

Authors

John Ifcher, Santa Clara UniversityFollow
Homa Zarghamee

Document Type

Article

Publication Date

9-2016

Publisher

Springer

Abstract

Experiments have demonstrated that men are more willing to compete than women. We develop a new instrument to “price” willingness to compete. We find that men value a $2.00 winner-take-all payment significantly more (about $0.28 more) than women; and that women require a premium (about 40 %) to compete. Our new instrument is more sensitive than the traditional binary-choice instrument, and thus, enables us to identify relationships that are not identifiable using the traditional binary-choice instrument. We find that subjects who are the most willing to compete have high ability, higher GPA’s (men), and take more STEM courses (women).

Comments

The final publication is available at Springer via https://doi.org/10.1007/s10683-015-9458-8.

Recommended Citation

Ifcher, J., & Zarghamee, H. (2016). Pricing competition: a new laboratory measure of gender differences in the willingness to compete. Experimental Economics, 19(3), 642–662.