Men too sometimes shy away from competition: The case of team competition

Marie-Pierre Dargnies

No SP II 2011-201, Discussion Papers, Research Unit: Market Behavior from Social Science Research Center Berlin (WZB)

Abstract: Recent results in experimental and personnel economics indicate that women do not like competitive environments as much as men. This article presents an experimental design giving participants the opportunity to enter a tournament as part of a team rather than alone. While a large and significant gender gap in entry in the individual tournament is found in line with the literature, no gender gap is found in entry in the team tournament. Women do not enter the tournament significantly more often when it is team-based but men enter significantly less when they are part of a team rather than alone. The main reason for men's disaffection for the team competition appears to be linked to the uncertainty on their teammate's ability. More precisely, high-performing men fear to be the victims of the free-riding behaviour of their teammate. --

Keywords: Teams; Gender Gap; Tournament (search for similar items in EconPapers)
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-dem, nep-exp, nep-hrm and nep-spo
Date: 2011
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations View citations in EconPapers (1) Track citations by RSS feed

Downloads: (external link)
http://econstor.eu/bitstream/10419/54575/1/68250856X.pdf (application/pdf)

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: http://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:zbw:wzbmbh:spii2011201

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Discussion Papers, Research Unit: Market Behavior from Social Science Research Center Berlin (WZB)
Contact information at EDIRC.
Series data maintained by ZBW - German National Library of Economics ().