The Impact of Advice on Women's and Men's Selection into Competition

Jordi Brandts, Valeska Groenert () and Christina Rott
Additional contact information
Valeska Groenert: Markets, Organizations and Votes in Economics, Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona, Bellaterra 08193, Spain; and Directorate General for Economic and Financial Affairs, European Commission, Brussels 1049, Belgium

Management Science, 2015, vol. 61, issue 5, 1018-1035

Abstract: We conduct a laboratory experiment to study how advice by a more experienced and better-informed person affects an individual's entry into a real-effort tournament and the gender gap. Our experiment is motivated by the concerns raised by approaching the gender gap through affirmative action policies. Overall, advice improves the entry decision of subjects, in that forgone earnings due to wrong entry decisions go significantly down. The improvements are mainly driven by increased entry of strong-performing women, who also become more confident, and reduced entry of weak-performing men. We find that the overall gender gap persists even though it disappears among low and strong performers. The persistence is due to an emerging gender gap among intermediate performers driven by women (men) following more the advice to stay out of (enter) the tournament in this performance group. This paper was accepted by Uri Gneezy, behavioral economics.

Keywords: experiments; advice; gender gap in competitiveness (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2015
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (20)

Downloads: (external link)
http://dx.doi.org/10.1287/mnsc.2013.1877 (application/pdf)

Related works:
Working Paper: The Impact of Advice on Women's and Men's Selection into Competition (2015)
Working Paper: The impact of advice on women's and men's selection into competition (2012)
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:inm:ormnsc:v:61:y:2015:i:5:p:1018-1035

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in Management Science from INFORMS Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Chris Asher ().