Laboratory Evidence on the Effects of Sponsorship on the Competitive Preferences of Men and Women

Katherine Coffman () and Nancy Baldiga
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Katherine Coffman: Department of Business Administration, Harvard Business School

No 1608, Working Papers from College of the Holy Cross, Department of Economics

Abstract: Sponsorship programs have been proposed as one way to promote female advancement in competitive career fields. A sponsor is someone who advocates for a prot�g�, and in doing so, takes a stake in her success. We use a laboratory experiment to explore two channels through which sponsorship has been posited to increase advancement in a competitive workplace. In our setting, being sponsored provides a vote of confidence and/or creates a link between the prot�g�s and sponsor�s payoffs. We find that both features of sponsorship significantly increase willingness to compete among men on average, while neither of these channels significantly increases willingness to compete among women on average. As a result, sponsorship does not close the gender gap in competitiveness or earnings. We discuss how these insights from the laboratory could help to inform the design of sponsorship programs in the field.

JEL-codes: O18 R53 Z28 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 14 pages
Date: 2016-12
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-exp
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Citations: View citations in EconPapers (5)

Published in Management Science, Volume 64, Number 2, February 2018, Pages 888-901.

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Related works:
Journal Article: Laboratory Evidence on the Effects of Sponsorship on the Competitive Preferences of Men and Women (2018)
Working Paper: Laboratory Evidence on the Effects of Sponsorship on the Competitive Preferences of Men and Women (2018)
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:hcx:wpaper:1608

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