No Gender Difference in Willingness to Compete When Competing Against Self
38 Pages Posted: 9 Feb 2017
Date Written: February 2017
Abstract
We report on two experiments investigating whether there is a gender difference in the willingness to compete against oneself (self-competition), similar to what is found when competing against others (other-competition). In one laboratory and one online market experiment, involving a total of 1,200 participants, we replicate the gender-gap in willingness to other-compete but find no evidence of a gender difference in the willingness to self-compete. We explore the roles of risk and confidence and suggest that these factors can account for the different findings. Finally, we document that self-competition does no worse than other-competition in terms of performance boosting.
Keywords: gender, competition, discrimination, experiment
JEL Classification: C90, C91, J16, J71
Suggested Citation: Suggested Citation