SBP: Gender Differences in Willingness to Compete - Incentive Mechanism Effects

经济学提出了这样一种观点，即女性的竞争力、风险承受能力和雄心壮志都不如男性。这一结论是基于实验得出的，在这些实验中，男性被放在竞争环境中时会提高他们的表现，当让他们选择竞争环境时，男性选择竞争环境的比率比女性更高。然而，除了几个明显的例外，这些实验中的奖励媒介是现金，完全有利于做出决定的受试者。最近的实验结果表明，当女性被置于竞争激烈但有利于社会的环境中时，女性缩小了与男性的竞争力差距，在这种环境中，个人可以与他人分享他们通过竞争获得的收益。这一发现表明，一旦锦标赛的获胜者被允许与失败者分享部分收益，女性的竞争力可能会与男性的竞争力一样强烈。将要进行的研究将进一步探讨这一现象，并确定产生这一结果的动机。这项工作将为设计促进性别平等的经济机构提供见解，并提出缩小性别差距的具体机制。这项研究将分两个阶段进行。第一个将在一项实验中考察男性和女性之间的竞争力差距，该实验涉及竞争性但亲社会的激励，其中竞争的选择是内生的。然后将进行一系列实验，以确定导致竞争力差距缩小的可能机制：真正的亲社会性，对不符合性别刻板印象的反弹的恐惧，以及风险规避。这一奖项反映了NSF的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的智力优势和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估，被认为值得支持。

Economics has advanced the idea that women are less competitive, less risk tolerant, and less ambitious than men. This conclusion is based on experiments in which men have been shown to increase their performance when placed in competitive environments and, when given a choice, to choose competitive environments at higher rates than women. However, with few notable exceptions, the reward medium in these experiments is cash exclusively benefiting the subject making the decisions. Recent experimental results show that women close the competitiveness gap with men when exogenously placed in competitive yet prosocial environments in which individuals can share their competitively earned gains with others. This finding suggests that female competitiveness can be just as intense as male competitiveness once the winners of tournaments are allowed to share some of the gains with the losers. The research to be undertaken will further explore this phenomenon and identify the motivations producing the result. The work will provide insights into designing economic institutions that promote gender equality and suggest specific mechanisms for closing the gender-gap.The research will proceed in two stages. The first will examine the competitiveness gap between men and women in an experiment involving competitive yet prosocial incentives where the choice to compete is endogenous. A series of experiments will then be conducted to identify possible mechanisms responsible for the reduction in the competitiveness gap: true pro-sociality, fear of backlash from not conforming to the gender stereotype, and risk aversion.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.