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

经济学提出了这样一种观点，即女性比男性竞争力更弱，风险承受力更低，野心更小。这一结论是根据实验得出的，在这些实验中，男性被证明在竞争环境中表现更好，而且在有选择的情况下，他们选择竞争环境的比例高于女性。然而，除了少数明显的例外，这些实验中的奖励媒介是现金，专门有利于决策的主体。最近的实验结果表明，女性关闭与男性的竞争力差距时，外生放置在竞争性但亲社会的环境中，个人可以分享他们的竞争力赚取的收益与他人。这一发现表明，一旦比赛的获胜者被允许与失败者分享一些收益，女性的竞争力就可以和男性的竞争力一样激烈。即将进行的研究将进一步探讨这一现象，并查明产生这一结果的动机。 这项工作将为设计促进两性平等的经济体制提供深刻见解，并为缩小性别差距提出具体机制。第一部分将在一项涉及竞争性但又有利于社会的激励措施的实验中研究男女之间的竞争力差距，在这个实验中，竞争的选择是内生的。通过一系列的实验，确定真正的亲社会性、对不符合性别刻板印象的反弹的恐惧和风险规避等可能的机制，以缩小竞争力差距。该奖项反映了NSF的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的智力价值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.