Gender differences in tournament and flat-wage schemes: An experimental study

David Masclet (), Emmanuel Peterle () and Sophie Larribeau ()

Journal of Economic Psychology, 2015, vol. 47, issue C, 103-115

Abstract: We present a new experiment that explores gender differences in both performance and compensation choices. While most of the previous studies have focused on tournament vs. piece-rate schemes, the originality of our study consists in examining the gender gap in the context of a flat wage scheme. Our data indicate that females exert a significantly higher effort than men in fixed payment schemes. We find however no gender difference in performance under the tournament scheme, due to a combination of two effects. On the one hand, men more significantly increase their effort when switching from a flat wage to a tournament scheme. On the other hand, when switching from the flat wage to a tournament scheme, women have less margin to increase performance since their effort was already relatively high with a flat wage. We also find that females are more likely than males to choose a flat-wage scheme than a tournament. This gap however narrows dramatically when feedback on previous experience is provided.

Keywords: Experiment; Gender differences; Tournament scheme; Flat-wage scheme (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C91 J16 J31 M52 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2015
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (25)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0167487015000045
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

Related works:
Working Paper: Gender differences in tournament and flat-wage schemes: An experimental study (2015)
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:joepsy:v:47:y:2015:i:c:p:103-115

DOI: 10.1016/j.joep.2015.01.003

Access Statistics for this article

Journal of Economic Psychology is currently edited by G. Antonides and D. Read

More articles in Journal of Economic Psychology from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().