Please use this identifier to cite or link to this item: https://hdl.handle.net/10419/55086 
Year of Publication: 
2011
Series/Report no.: 
IZA Discussion Papers No. 5999
Publisher: 
Institute for the Study of Labor (IZA), Bonn
Abstract: 
Are women disproportionately attracted to work environments where cooperation rather than competition is rewarded? This paper reports the results of a real-effort experiment in which participants choose between an individual compensation scheme and a team-based payment scheme. We find that women are more likely than men to select team-based compensation in our baseline treatment, but women and men join teams with equal frequency when we add an efficiency advantage to team production. Using a simple structural discrete choice framework to reconcile these facts, we show that three elements can explain the observed patterns in the team-entry gender gap: (1) a gender gap in confidence in others (i.e. women are less pessimistic about their prospective teammates' relative ability), (2) a greater responsiveness among men to instrumental reasons for joining teams, and (3) a greater pure preference for working in a team environment among women.
Subjects: 
gender
cooperation
self-selection
confidence
experiment
JEL: 
C91
J16
J24
J31
M5
Persistent Identifier of the first edition: 
Document Type: 
Working Paper

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