Of mice and men: Within gender variation in strategic behavior

Marco Castillo (marco.castillo@tamu.edu) and Philip J. Cross

Games and Economic Behavior, 2008, vol. 64, issue 2, 421-432

Abstract: We study behavioral differences across and within genders in a family of ultimatum and dictator games. We find these differences are due not only to altruistic preferences but also beliefs about the strategic behavior of others. The behavior of men in strategic situations is not significantly more aggressive than women on average. But this average masks wide variation in intra-gender behavior. In particular, a sizable minority of males are "mice," behaving timidly in strategic environments. Our experimental design shows that the standard ultimatum game can mask significant inter- and intra-gender differences in strategic behavior. These behavioral patterns in strategic environments are shown to be correlated with preferences for altruism in non-strategic settings. Such gender differences could well manifest themselves in real-world large-stakes transactions, such as salary negotiations.

Keywords: Noncooperative; games; Experimental; economics; Beliefs (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2008
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (15)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0899-8256(08)00043-2
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

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:eee:gamebe:v:64:y:2008:i:2:p:421-432

Access Statistics for this article

Games and Economic Behavior is currently edited by E. Kalai

More articles in Games and Economic Behavior from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu (repec@elsevier.com).