Laboratory Evidence on the Effects of Sponsorship on the Competitive Preferences of Men and Women

Nancy Baldiga and Katherine B. Coffman ()
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Katherine B. Coffman: Harvard Business School, Boston, Massachusetts 02163

Management Science, 2018, vol. 64, issue 2, 888-901

Abstract: Sponsorship programs have been proposed as one way to promote female advancement in competitive career fields. A sponsor is someone who advocates for a protégé, and in doing so, takes a stake in her success. We use a laboratory experiment to explore two channels through which sponsorship has been posited to increase advancement in a competitive workplace. In our setting, being sponsored provides a vote of confidence and/or creates a link between the protégé’s and sponsor’s payoffs. We find that both features of sponsorship significantly increase willingness to compete among men on average, while neither of these channels significantly increases willingness to compete among women on average. As a result, sponsorship does not close the gender gap in competitiveness or earnings. We discuss how these insights from the laboratory could help to inform the design of sponsorship programs in the field.

Keywords: economics; behavior and behavioral decision making; gender; laboratory experiment (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2018
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (14)

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https://doi.org/10.287/mnsc.2016.2606 (application/pdf)

Related works:
Working Paper: Laboratory Evidence on the Effects of Sponsorship on the Competitive Preferences of Men and Women (2018)
Working Paper: Laboratory Evidence on the Effects of Sponsorship on the Competitive Preferences of Men and Women (2016)
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:inm:ormnsc:v:64:y:2018:i:2:p:-888-901

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