Incentives and Gender in a Multitask Setting: an Experimental Study with Real-Effort Tasks

Zahra Murad, Charitini Stavropoulou and Graham Cookson
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Charitini Stavropoulou: City University of London
Graham Cookson: Surrey Business School

No 2018-07, Working Papers in Economics & Finance from University of Portsmouth, Portsmouth Business School, Economics and Finance Subject Group

Abstract: This paper investigates the behavioural effects of competitive, social and image incentives on men’s and women’s allocation of effort in a multitask environment. Specifically, using two real-effort laboratory tasks, we investigate how competitive prizes, social value generation and public awards affect effort allocation decisions between the tasks. We find that all three types of incentives significantly focus effort allocation towards the task they are applied in, but the effect varies significantly between men and women. The highest effort distortion lies with competitive incentives, which is due to the effort allocation decision of men. Women exert similar amount of effort across the three incentive conditions, with slightly lower effort levels in the social-image incentivized tasks. Our results inform how and why genders differences may persist in competitive workplaces.

Keywords: Incentives; Gender Differences; Multitasking; Experiments (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C91 C92 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 33
Date: 2018-09-19
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-cbe, nep-exp and nep-hrm
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

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Journal Article: Incentives and gender in a multi-task setting: An experimental study with real-effort tasks (2019)
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