In this study, we report experimental results on the dictator decision collected in two neighboring ethnic minority groups, the matrilineal Mosuo and the patriarchal Yi, in southwestern China. We follow the double-blind protocol as in Eckel and Grossman (in Handbook of experimental economics results, 1998), who find that women in the U.S. donate more than men. We find this pattern reversed in the Mosuo society and find no gender difference in the Yi society. This is highly suggestive that societal factors play an important role in shaping the gender differences in pro-social behavior such as dictator giving.

Female specialization on household work and male specialization on labor-market work is a widely observed phenomenon across time and countries. This absence of gender neutrality with respect to work-division is known as the “work-division puzzle”. Gender differences regarding characteristics (preferences, productivity) and context (wage rates, social norms) are generally recognized as competing explanations for this fact. We experimentally control for context and productivity to investigate preferences for work-division by true co-habiting couples, in a newly developed specialization task. Efficiency in this task comes at the cost of inequality, giving higher earnings to the “advantaged” player. We compare behavior when men (or women) are in the advantaged position, which corresponds to the traditional (or power) couple case where he (or she) earns more. Women and men contribute equally to the household public good in all conditions. This result allows us to rule out some of the standard explanations of the work-division puzzle.

We present evidence of a direct social context effect on decision-making under uncertainty: the gender composition of those in the room when making individual risky decisions significantly alters choices even when the actions or presence of others are not payoff relevant. In our environment, decision makers do not know the choices made by others, nor can they be inferred from the experiment. We find that women become more risk taking as the proportion of men in the room increases, but the behavior of men is unaffected by who is present. We discuss some potential mechanisms for this result and conjecture it is driven by women being aware of the social context and imitating the expected behavior of others. Our results imply that the environment in which individual decisions are made can change expressed preferences and that aggregate behavior may be context dependent.

We examine the role of cognitive ability and personality traits in a gift exchange experiment. Controlling for cognitive ability and personality characteristics, men offer higher wages than women, and men and women with greater cognitive ability and greater agreeableness on the Big Five personality scale offer higher wages as well. Men provide greater effort than women do, and respond to higher wage rates with greater increases in effort. For both genders, one standard deviation increases in agreeableness and in wages generate similar increases in effort. Serious biases arise from omitting cognitive ability and pooling men and women.

There is substantial evidence that women tend to support different policies and political candidates than men. Many studies also document gender differences in a variety of important preference dimensions, such as risk-taking, competition and pro-sociality. However, the degree to which differential voting by men and women is related to these gaps in more basic preferences requires an improved understanding. We conduct an experiment in which individuals in small laboratory “societies” repeatedly vote for redistribution policies and engage in production. We find that women vote for more egalitarian redistribution and that this difference persists with experience and in environments with varying degrees of risk. This gender voting gap is accounted for partly by both gender gaps in preferences and by expectations regarding economic circumstances. However, including both these controls in a regression analysis indicates that the latter is the primary driving force. We also observe policy differences between male- and female-controlled groups, though these are substantially smaller than the mean individual differences—a natural consequence of the aggregation of individual preferences into collective outcomes.

We study how culture and social structure influence bargaining behavior across gender, by exploring the negotiation culture in matrilineal and patriarchal societies using data from a laboratory experiment and a natural field experiment. One interesting result is that in both the actual marketplace and in the laboratory bargaining game, women in the matrilineal society earn more than men, at odds with years of evidence observed in the western world. We find that this result is critically driven by which side of the market the person is occupying: female (male) sellers in the matrilineal (patriarchal) society extract more of the bargaining surplus than male (female) sellers. In the buyer role, however, we observe no significant differences across societies.

We look at gender differences among adolescents in Sweden in preferences for competition, altruism and risk. For competitiveness, we explore two different tasks that differ in associated stereotypes. We find no gender difference in competitiveness when comparing performance under competition to that without competition. We further find that boys and girls are equally likely to self-select into competition in a verbal task, but that boys are significantly more likely to choose to compete in a mathematical task. This gender gap diminishes and becomes non-significant when we control for actual performance, beliefs about relative performance, and risk preferences, or for beliefs only. Girls are also more altruistic and less risk taking than boys.

Experiments have demonstrated that men are more willing to compete than women. We develop a new instrument to “price” willingness to compete. We find that men value a $2.00 winner-take-all payment significantly more (about $0.28 more) than women; and that women require a premium (about 40 %) to compete. Our new instrument is more sensitive than the traditional binary-choice instrument, and thus, enables us to identify relationships that are not identifiable using the traditional binary-choice instrument. We find that subjects who are the most willing to compete have high ability, higher GPA’s (men), and take more STEM courses (women).

This paper reports findings of a laboratory experiment, which explores how reported self-assessment regarding the own relative performance is perceived by others. In particular, I investigate whether overconfident or underconfident subjects are considered as more likeable, and who of the two is expected to win in a tournament, thereby controlling for performance. Underconfidence beats overconfidence in both respects. Underconfident subjects are rewarded significantly more often than overconfident subjects, and are significantly more often expected to win. Subjects being less convinced of their performance are taken as more congenial and are expected to be more ambitious to improve, whereas overconfident subjects are rather expected to rest on their high beliefs. While subjects do not anticipate the stronger performance signal of underconfidence, they anticipate its higher sympathy value. The comparison to a non-strategic setting shows that men strategically deflate their self-assessment to be rewarded by others. Women, in contrast, either do not deflate their self-assessment or do so even in non-strategic situations, a behavior that might be driven by non-monetary image concerns of women.

Competition involves two main dimensions, a rivalry for resources and the ranking of relative performance. If socially recognized, the latter yields a ranking in terms of social status. The rivalry for resources resulting from competitive incentives has been found to negatively affect women’s performance relative to that of men. However, little is known about gender differences in the performance consequences of social-status ranking. In our experiments we introduce a novel design that allows us to isolate the effects of status ranking from those caused by a rivalry for resources. Subjects do a time-limited task where they need to search for numbers and add them up. Performance is straightforwardly measured by the number of correct summations. When there is no status ranking we find no gender differences in the number of attempted summations or in performance. By contrast, when there is status ranking men significantly increase the number of attempted summations as well as the number of correct summations. Remarkably, when women are subjected to status ranking, they significantly decrease the number of attempted summations. The net result is striking. With status ranking men attempt more summations and correctly solve many more than women. These differences are markedly large and statistically highly significant. Our results suggest that increased participation in competitive environments could harm women’s labor market success along a hidden channel.

Recent studies find that women are less competitive than men. This gender difference in competitiveness has been suggested as one possible explanation for why men occupy the majority of top positions in many sectors. In this study we explore competitiveness in children, with the premise that both context and gendered stereotypes regarding the task at hand may influence competitive behavior. A related field experiment on Israeli children shows that only boys react to competition by running faster when competing in a race. We here test if there is a gender gap in running among 7-10 year old Swedish children. We also introduce two female sports, skipping rope and dancing, to see if competitiveness is task dependent. We find no gender difference in reaction to competition in any task; boys and girls compete equally. Studies in different environments with different types of tasks are thus important in order to make generalizable claims about gender differences in competitiveness.

Empirical studies cast doubt on the efficiency assumption made in standard economic models of household behavior. In couples, the allocation of time between activities remains highly differentiated by gender. In this paper we examine whether couples deviate from efficiency in household production, using an experimental design. We compare the allocation of gendered vs. gender-neutral domestic tasks. Our results show that women in the household overspecialize in “feminine tasks” and men in “masculine tasks” compared to what their comparative advantage would require, hence revealing the influence of gender roles and stereotypes on the couples’ behavior.

This paper analyzes if men and women are expected to behave differently regarding altruism. Since the dictator game provides the most suitable design for studying altruism and generosity in the lab setting, we use a modified version to study the beliefs involved in the game. Our results are substantial: men and women are expected to behave differently. Moreover, while women believe that women are more generous, men consider that women are as generous as men.

We expand the scope of the literature on willingness to compete by asking how it varies with academic ability and whether and how it predicts career choices at different ability levels. The literature so far has mainly focused on career choices made by students at the top of the ability distribution, particularly in academic institutions. We experimentally elicit the willingness to compete of 1500 Swiss lower-secondary school students at all ability levels and link it to the study choice that students make upon finishing compulsory school. Our analysis of the relationship between willingness to compete and the study choice considers the full set of study options, including the options in vocational education. We find that willingness to compete predicts which study option high-ability students choose, not only among academic specializations but also among vocational careers, and, importantly, it also predicts whether low-ability boys pursue upper-secondary education upon finishing compulsory schooling. Our second main contribution is to systematically explore how willingness to compete varies with academic ability. We find that high-ability boys, but not girls, are substantially more willing to compete compared to all other children. As a consequence, the gender gap in willingness to compete is significantly lower among low-ability students than among high-ability students. Overall, our study highlights that insights from the literature on willingness to compete are relevant for a broader set of policy questions, populations and choices.

We study gender differences in relation to performance and sabotage in competitions. While we find no systematic gender differences in performance in the real effort task, we observe a strong gender gap in sabotage choices in our experiment. This gap is rooted in the uncertainty about the opponent’s sabotage: in the absence of information about the opponent’s sabotage choice, males expect to suffer from sabotage to a higher degree than females and choose higher sabotage levels themselves. If beliefs are exogenously aligned by implementing sabotage via strategy method, the gender gap in sabotage choices disappears. Moreover, providing a noisy signal about the sabotage level from which subjects might suffer leads to an endogenous alignment of beliefs and eliminates the gender gap in sabotage.

This study investigates whether market composition affects individual bidding and the aggregate market in first-price sealed-bid common-value auctions. It compares all-inexperienced markets with only inexperienced bidders, all-experienced markets with only experienced bidders, and mixed markets with both types. On average, there is no market-composition effect for both experienced and inexperienced bidders. When controlling for gender, a market-composition effect appears for inexperienced subjects: Men bid more aggressively in mixed than in all-inexperienced markets, and women bid more aggressively in all-inexperienced markets. On the aggregate level, the all-inexperienced market is the most aggressive with highest winning bids; the all-experienced market is the least aggressive. The mixed market is in between: Both experienced and inexperienced win auctions in this market, but experienced bidders win less auctions than they should.

A laboratory study was carried out to analyze the relationship between ambiguity regarding the sharing norms in structured alternating-offer bargaining and gender differences in bargaining. Symmetric environments, where a 50:50 split emerges as the unique sensible norm, showed the lowest ambiguity and gender differences are absent. We increased ambiguity by introducing asymmetries into the bargaining environment by making one bargaining party get a higher share than the other (due to empowerment, entitlement or informational asymmetries), but without imposing new sharing norms. In these situations, men are less likely to reach an agreement, but, when they do, they obtain a larger share of the pie. As a result, men and women show similar overall earnings but earnings are lower when bargaining with men. We find suggestive evidence that gender differences diminish when we reduce ambiguity regarding the sharing norms by providing information about other participants’ agreements in asymmetric environments.

Individual willingness to enter competitive environments predicts career choices and labor market outcomes. Meanwhile, many people experience competitive contexts as stressful. We use two laboratory experiments to investigate whether factors related to stress can help explain individual differences in tournament entry. Experiment 1 studies whether stress responses (measured as salivary cortisol) to taking part in a mandatory tournament predict individual willingness to participate in a voluntary tournament. We find that competing increases stress levels. This cortisol response does not predict tournament entry for men but is positively and significantly correlated with choosing to enter the tournament for women. In Experiment 2, we exogenously induce physiological stress using the cold-pressor task. We find a positive causal effect of stress on tournament entry for women but no effect for men. Finally, we show that although the effect of stress on tournament entry differs between the genders, stress reactions cannot explain the well-documented gender difference in willingness to compete.

We examine how multitasking affects performance. We also examine whether individuals optimally choose their degree of multitasking or whether they perform better under an externally imposed schedule. Subjects in our experiment perform two different tasks according to one of three treatments: one where they perform the tasks sequentially, one where they are forced to multitask, and one where they can freely organize their work. Subjects who are forced to multitask perform significantly worse than those forced to work sequentially. Surprisingly, subjects who can freely organize their own schedule also perform significantly worse. These results suggest that scheduling is a significant determinant of productivity. Finally, our results do not support the stereotype that women are better at multitasking. Women suffer as much as men when forced to multitask and are actually less inclined to multitask when being free to choose.

To be effective, central bankers must project expertise and an anti-inflation commitment. However, those attributes are usually male-coded, which may undermine female central bankers. We assess gender bias using a survey experiment fielded in Japan in September 2022, when, for the first time in decades, the Bank of Japan appeared to struggle with inflation. We exposed individuals to simplified Bank of Japan communication and randomly assigned attribution to male (Mr. Adachi) or female (Ms. Nakagawa) Policy Board members. Respondents trusted the Bank of Japan less and were more sceptical of its capacity to handle inflation when Ms. Nakagawa represented it.