Please use this identifier to cite or link to this item: https://hdl.handle.net/10419/204707 
Year of Publication: 
2019
Series/Report no.: 
Discussion Papers of the Max Planck Institute for Research on Collective Goods No. 2019/9
Publisher: 
Max Planck Institute for Research on Collective Goods, Bonn
Abstract: 
Tournament incentives prevail in labor markets. Yet, the number of tournament winners is often unclear to competitors. While it is hard to measure how this uncertainty affects work performance and willingness to compete in the field, it can be studied in a controlled lab experiment. We present a novel experiment where subjects can compete against each other, but the number of winners is either uncertain (but with known probabilities) or ambiguous (with unknown probabilities for different numbers of winners). We compare these two conditions to a control treatment with a known number of winners. We find that ambiguity induces a significant increase in the performance of men who choose to compete, while we observe no change for women. Men also increase their willingness to enter competition in the presence of ambiguity. Overall, both effects contribute to men winning the tournament significantly more often than women under uncertainty and ambiguity. These findings suggest that management should make tournament conditions transparent and information available in order to prevent gender disparities from increasing under uncertainty and ambiguity.
Subjects: 
Gender
competition
uncertainty
ambiguity
experiment
JEL: 
C91
D03
D09
Document Type: 
Working Paper

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