Does Unfairness Hurt Women? The Effects of Losing Unfair Competitions

Stefano Piasenti (), Marica Valente, Roel van Veldhuizen () and Gregor Pfeifer

Working Papers from Faculty of Economics and Statistics, Universität Innsbruck

Abstract: How do men and women differ in their persistence after experiencing failure in a competitive environment? We tackle this question by combining a large online experiment (N=2,086) with machine learning. We find that when losing is unequivocally due to merit, both men and women exhibit a significant decrease in subsequent tournament entry. However, when the prior tournament is unfair, i.e., a loss is no longer necessarily based on merit, women are more discouraged than men. These results suggest that transparent meritocratic criteria may play a key role in preventing women from falling behind after experiencing a loss.

Keywords: Competitiveness; Gender; Fairness; Machine learning; Online experiment (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C14 C90 D91 J16 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 60
Date: 2023-11
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-big and nep-exp
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https://www2.uibk.ac.at/downloads/c9821000/wpaper/2023-11.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Working Paper: Does Unfairness Hurt Women? The Effects of Losing Unfair Competitions (2023)
Working Paper: Does Unfairness Hurt Women? The Effects of Losing Unfair Competitions (2023)
Working Paper: Does Unfairness Hurt Women? The Effects of Losing Unfair Competitions (2023)
Working Paper: Does Unfairness Hurt Women? The Effects of Losing Unfair Competitions (2023)
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