Gender and Peer Effects in Social Networks

Julie Beugnot (), Bernard Fortin (), Guy Lacroix and Marie Claire Villeval

Working Papers from HAL

Abstract: We investigate whether peer effects at work differ by gender and whether the gender difference in peer effects –if any- depends on work organization, precisely the structure of social networks. We develop a social network model with gender heterogeneity that we test by means of a realeffort laboratory experiment. We compare sequential networks in which information on peers flows exclusively downward (from peers to the worker) and simultaneous networks where it disseminates bi-directionally along an undirected line (from peers to the worker and from the worker to peers). We identify strong gender differences in peer effects, as males' effort increases with peers' performance in both types of network, whereas females behave conditionally. While they are influenced by peers in sequential networks, females disregard their peers' performance when information flows in both directions. We reject that the difference between networks is driven by having one's performance observed by others or by the presence of peers in the same session in simultaneous networks. We interpret the gender difference in terms of perception of a higher competitiveness of the environment in simultaneous than in sequential networks because of the bi-directional flow of information.

Keywords: Gender; peer effects; social networks; work effort; experiment (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2017-03-01
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-exp, nep-gen, nep-net, nep-soc and nep-ure
Note: View the original document on HAL open archive server: https://hal.science/hal-01481999v2
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
https://hal.science/hal-01481999v2/document (application/pdf)

Related works:
Working Paper: Gender and Peer Effects in Social Networks (2017)
Working Paper: Gender and Peer Effects in Social Networks (2017)
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:hal:wpaper:hal-01481999

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Working Papers from HAL
Bibliographic data for series maintained by CCSD ().