Please use this identifier to cite or link to this item: https://hdl.handle.net/10419/163065 
Year of Publication: 
2017
Series/Report no.: 
WIDER Working Paper No. 2017/90
Publisher: 
The United Nations University World Institute for Development Economics Research (UNU-WIDER), Helsinki
Abstract: 
We design an experiment to examine whether egalitarian preferences, and in particular, behindness aversion as well as preference for favourable inequality affect competitive choices differently among males and females. We find that selection into competitive environments is: (a) negatively related to egalitarian preferences, with smaller negative impacts of being egalitarian on females' choice of the tournament wage scheme, and (b) negatively associated with behindness aversion and positively related to preference for favourable inequality, with significant gender differences in the impact of these distributional preferences. Once we allow for the impact of distributional preferences, behavioural, personality, and socioeconomic characteristics to vary by gender, the pure gender effect is explained away. We find that gender gaps in distributional preferences along with selected personality traits are the most relevant explanations for gender differences in willingness to compete. This is an important result as these characteristics are per se malleable and amenable to policy interventions.
Subjects: 
competitiveness
distributional preferences
gender differences
JEL: 
C91
D03
D63
J16
Persistent Identifier of the first edition: 
ISBN: 
978-92-9256-314-1
Document Type: 
Working Paper

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