The Impact of Advice on Women's and Men's Selection into Competition

• 成果类型: Article
• 署名作者: Brandts, Jordi; Groenert, Valeska; Rott, Christina
• 署名单位: Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Cientificas (CSIC); CSIC - Institut d'Analisi Economica (IAE); Barcelona School of Economics; Autonomous University of Barcelona; Autonomous University of Barcelona; Maastricht University
• 刊物名称: MANAGEMENT SCIENCE
• ISSN/ISSBN: 0025-1909
• DOI: 10.1287/mnsc.2013.1877
• 发表日期: 2015
• 页码: 1018-1035
• 关键词: Experiments; advice; gender gap in competitiveness

摘要

We conduct a laboratory experiment to study how advice by a more experienced and better-informed person affects an individual's entry into a real-effort tournament and the gender gap. Our experiment is motivated by the concerns raised by approaching the gender gap through affirmative action policies. Overall, advice improves the entry decision of subjects, in that forgone earnings due to wrong entry decisions go significantly down. The improvements are mainly driven by increased entry of strong-performing women, who also become more confident, and reduced entry of weak-performing men. We find that the overall gender gap persists even though it disappears among low and strong performers. The persistence is due to an emerging gender gap among intermediate performers driven by women (men) following more the advice to stay out of (enter) the tournament in this performance group.