Positive Feedback Shapes Gender Gaps in Adolescent RiskTaking – Causal Evidence from Real-Risk Competitions

Mario Lackner and Hendrik Sonnabend

No 2025-10, Economics working papers from Department of Economics, Johannes Kepler University Linz, Austria

Abstract: This paper explores how positive feedback in a competitive setting shapes the evolution of gender differences in risk tolerance during adolescence. We use data from professional diving, a ‘real life, real risk’ environment where the notion of risk is very intuitive and associated with the height of the dive. We find that young divers are more engaged in high-risk (platform) competitions after their first win in a low-risk (springboard) competition. This effect is driven by individuals with no prior platform experience and is more pronounced for males: On average, male divers are 37% more likely to participate in platform diving after their first win compared to 10% for female divers. Additional findings indicate that the treatment intensity (for female divers) and the coach’s gender (for male divers) are moderators of the effect.

Keywords: risk-taking; positive feedback; gender; adolescence (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D01 D81 D91 J16 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2025-06
Note: English
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.economics.jku.at/papers/2025/wp2510.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: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:jku:econwp:2025-10

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Economics working papers from Department of Economics, Johannes Kepler University Linz, Austria Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by René Böheim ().