Please use this identifier to cite or link to this item: https://hdl.handle.net/10419/127327 
Year of Publication: 
2011
Series/Report no.: 
Discussion Paper Series No. 511
Publisher: 
University of Heidelberg, Department of Economics, Heidelberg
Abstract: 
There is ample evidence that women do not react to competition as men do and are less willing to enter a competition than men (e.g., Gneezy et al.(2003), Niederle and Vesterlund (2007)). In this paper, we use personality variables to understand the underlying motives of women (and men) to enter a competition or avoid it. We use the Big Five personality factors (Goldberg (1981), McCrae and Costa JR (2003)), where especially neuroticism has been related to performance in achievement settings. We first test whether scores on the Big Five are related to performance in our experiment, and second how this is related to incentives. We can show that the sex di fference in the willingness to enter a competition is mediated by neuroticism and further that neuroticism is negatively related to performance in competiton. This raises the possibility that those women who do not choose competitive incentives "know" that they should not.
Subjects: 
Gender
Personality
Big Five
Five-factor Model
Competition
Experiment
JEL: 
D03
C91
J16
L00
Persistent Identifier of the first edition: 
Document Type: 
Working Paper

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