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Article
Pricing Competition: A New Laboratory Measure of Gender Differences in the Willingness to Compete
Economics
  • John Ifcher, Santa Clara University
  • Homa Zarghamee
Document Type
Article
Publication Date
9-1-2016
Publisher
Springer
Disciplines
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.

Citation Information
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.