Gender, Emotions, and Tournament Performance in the Laboratory

Brianna Halladay
Additional contact information
Brianna Halladay: Eastern Connecticut State University, Department of Economics, Willimantic, CT 06226, USA

Games, 2017, vol. 8, issue 3, 1-26

Abstract: Individuals face competitive environments daily, and it is important to understand how emotions affect behavior in these environments and resulting economic consequences. Using a two-stage laboratory experiment, I analyze the role of reported emotions in tournament performance and assess how the behavioral response differs across genders. The first stage serves to induce emotions, while the second stage presents the subject with a one-on-one winner-take-all tournament with the individual who generated the feeling, using a real-effort task. Ultimately, I show that women respond to the negative feelings more strongly than men. I find that women increase performance when experiencing negative emotions, while male performance remains unaffected. Remarkably, there is no gender gap in tournament performance when there are negative emotions.

Keywords: gender; competition; experimental economics; emotions (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C C7 C70 C71 C72 C73 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2017
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (2)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.mdpi.com/2073-4336/8/3/26/pdf (application/pdf)
https://www.mdpi.com/2073-4336/8/3/26/ (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:gam:jgames:v:8:y:2017:i:3:p:26-:d:102964

Access Statistics for this article

Games is currently edited by Ms. Susie Huang

More articles in Games from MDPI
Bibliographic data for series maintained by MDPI Indexing Manager ().