Masayuki Yagasaki, Mitsunosuke Morishita
arXiv 27 Jan 2018 · Econometrics
arXiv:1801.10518 · PDF · DOI · OpenAlex · Extracted main text
Why women avoid participating in a competition and how can we encourage them to participate in it? In this paper, we investigate how social image concerns affect women's decision to compete. We first construct a theoretical model and show that participating in a competition, even under affirmative action policies favoring women, is costly for women under public observability since it deviates from traditional female gender norms, resulting in women's low appearance in competitive environments. We propose and theoretically show that introducing prosocial incentives in the competitive environment is effective and robust to public observability since (i) it induces women who are intrinsically motivated by prosocial incentives to the competitive environment and (ii) it makes participating in a competition not costly for women from social image point of view. We conduct a laboratory experiment where we randomly manipulate the public observability of decisions to compete and test our theoretical predictions. The results of the experiment are fairly consistent with our theoretical predictions. We suggest that when designing policies to promote gender equality in competitive environments, using prosocial incentives through company philanthropy or other social responsibility policies, either as substitutes or as complements to traditional affirmative action policies, could be promising.
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The works this paper leans on most, across its whole bibliography — not restricted to papers in our corpus. Ranked by composite intensity, which combines how often a work is mentioned, how many sections mention it, and how much of that falls in the main text rather than the appendix.
| Reference | Intensity | Mentions | Sections | Main text | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Bursztyn, Egorov and Jensen (2017) Cool to be Smart or Smart to be Cool? Understanding Peer Pressure in Education | 0.941 | 6 | 3 | 83% |
| 2 | Bursztyn, Fujiwara and Pallais (2017) 'Acting Wife': Marriage Market Incentives and Labor Market Investments | 0.874 | 7 | 2 | 100% |
| 3 | Niederle and Vesterlund (2007) Do Women Shy Away From Competition? Do Men Compete Too Much? | 0.874 | 6 | 2 | 100% |
| 4 | Ariely, Bracha and Meier (2009) Doing good or doing well? Image motivation and monetary incentives in behaving prosocially | 0.737 | 3 | 2 | 100% |
| 5 | Bursztyn and Jensen (2017) Social Image and Economic Behavior in the Field: Identifying, Understanding, and Shaping Social Pressure | 0.737 | 3 | 2 | 100% |
| 6 | Niederle, Segal and Vesterlund (2013) How Costly Is Diversity? Affirmative Action in Light of Gender Differences in Competitiveness | 0.737 | 3 | 2 | 100% |
| 7 | Fisman, Iyengar, Kamenica and Simonson (2006) Gender Differences in Mate Selection: Evidence From a Speed Dating Experiment | 0.644 | 2 | 2 | 100% |
| 8 | Tonin and Vlassopoulos (2010) Disentangling the sources of pro-socially motivated effort: A field experiment | 0.644 | 2 | 2 | 100% |
| 9 | Tonin and Vlassopoulos (2015) Corporate Philanthropy and Productivity: Evidence from an Online Real Effort Experiment | 0.644 | 2 | 2 | 100% |
| 10 | Bursztyn and Jensen (2015) How Does Peer Pressure Affect Educational Investments? | 0.511 | 2 | 1 | 100% |
Showing the top 10 of 34 scored citations.