We study gender differences in relation to performance and sabotage in competitions. While we find no systematic gender differences in performance in the real effort task, we observe a strong gender ...gap in sabotage choices in our experiment. This gap is rooted in the uncertainty about the opponent’s sabotage: in the absence of information about the opponent’s sabotage choice, males expect to suffer from sabotage to a higher degree than females and choose higher sabotage levels themselves. If beliefs are exogenously aligned by implementing sabotage via strategy method, the gender gap in sabotage choices disappears. Moreover, providing a noisy signal about the sabotage level from which subjects might suffer leads to an endogenous alignment of beliefs and eliminates the gender gap in sabotage.
Besides cognitive skills, non-cognitive skills-social skills in particular-are crucial for outcomes in various domains of life. The present work describes the design of the
project, an intervention ...study with children aged 10-13 years using enhanced physical education lessons to foster social skills in a playful way. Utilizing a novel methodological approach various incentivized economic experiments were applied to test for spillover effects of the intervention on social skills. At three points during the course of the study individuals participated in a series of incentivized economic experiments to elicit economic preferences and personality traits. Additional information about physical activity and free time activities, different psychometric scales, and family background were elicited with questionnaires. Furthermore, a subset of individuals was equipped with accelerometers for 7 days to validate the answers on physical activity in the questionnaire. The data set comprises a treatment group which received enhanced physical education lessons and a control group which received regular physical education lessons at school. The comparison of individuals' decision in the economic experiments between both groups allows to study the impact of our intervention on social skills.
•Analysis of gender differences in a real effort two-player tournament in the lab.•No performance differences between males and females.•Males sabotage more than females, leading to a higher winning ...probability.•If gender of opponent is known, males enhance performance.•Reaction of males is more pronounced when competing with a female opponent.
We study the differences in behavior of males and females in a two-player tournament with sabotage in a controlled lab experiment. Implementing a real-effort design and a principal who is paid based on the agent's output, we find that males and females do not differ in their performance in the real effort task but in their choice of sabotage. Males select significantly more sabotage, leading to an, on average, higher winning probability but not to higher profits. If the gender of the opponent is revealed before the tournament, males increase their performance in the real-effort task especially if the opponent is female. The gender gap in sabotage is persistent. We discuss possible explanations for our findings and their implications.
We empirically investigate whether tournaments between heterogeneous contestants are less intense. To test our hypotheses, we use professional sports data from the TOYOTA Handball-Bundesliga, the ...major handball league in Germany. Based on sports betting odds, we estimate the differences in winning probabilities of the competing teams and find evidence for a negative impact of the matchup’s heterogeneity on the intensity of the game. The decrease is significant not only at the beginning but also toward the end of the game. Further analysis shows that the overall intensity decrease is almost entirely driven by the reaction of the ex ante favorite team.
We study the effects of managerial turnover on earnings management activities in a model in which managers care about their external reputation. We develop an overlapping generations model showing ...that both outgoing and incoming managers bias reported earnings such that typically very low returns are reported in the first period after a manager has been replaced. Outgoing managers shift earnings forward to their last period in office as they will not benefit from earnings realized after that. Incoming managers can have an incentive to shift earnings to the second period in office as reported earnings will, immediately after a management change, only be partly attributed to their own ability. Deferred compensation can reduce incentives for earnings management.
Lying and reciprocity Dato, Simon; Feess, Eberhard; Nieken, Petra
Games and economic behavior,
11/2019, Letnik:
118
Journal Article
Recenzirano
We extend the literature on the determinants of lying to the impact of reciprocity in strategic interactions. We study a theoretical model with reciprocity by assuming that a player's degree of ...altruism depends on her perception of the other player's altruism towards herself. Specifically, we consider a sequential two-player-contest and vary the second mover's degree of information on the first movers lying behavior. This yields predictions on the second mover's behavior which we study in a largescale online-experiment and the laboratory. Surprisingly, the second mover's lying propensity does not depend on her information on the first mover's lying behavior. To investigate whether this is specific to lying, we consider an additional treatment with the same payoff structure where subjects can increase their chances of winning by simple statements without lying. As we do find evidence for reciprocity there, the lack of reciprocity cannot solely be attributed to the contest structure.
An increasing number of workers participate in online labor markets. In contrast to traditional employment relationships within firms, the interaction between online workers and their employers are ...short and impersonal, which makes motivating online workers more challenging. We present results from two large-scale controlled field experiments on Amazon Mechanical Turk investigating the effects of monetary rewards and soft leadership techniques on output quantity and quality. In the first study, we investigate the effects of monetary rewards and simple upfront messages (praise or reference points). Monetary rewards increase quantity significantly. Sending simple messages, however, can have a significantly negative effect on quantity. The second study concentrates on the effects of communication based on charismatic leadership techniques. Charismatic communication techniques can also backfire if only a subset of them is used, whereas using a broad set including quantitative goals increases output quantity significantly. Neither intervention had a significant effect on the quality of work.
We investigate contract negotiations in the presence of externalities and asymmetric information in a controlled laboratory experiment. In our setup, it is commonly known that it is always ex post ...efficient for player
A
to implement a project that has a positive external effect on player
B
. However, player
A
has private information about whether or not it is in player
A
’s self-interest to implement the project even when no agreement with player
B
is reached. Theoretically, an ex post efficient agreement can always be reached if the externality is large, whereas this is not the case if the externality is small. We vary the size of the externality and the bargaining process. The experimental results are broadly in line with the theoretical predictions. However, even when the externality is large, the players fail to achieve ex post efficiency in a substantial fraction of the observations. This finding holds in ultimatum-game bargaining as well as in unstructured bargaining with free-form communication.
We investigate a simple two‐person tournament in a controlled laboratory experiment. Each player chooses between two distributions of random shocks. After observing the overall risk, both players ...decide simultaneously on their effort. Theory predicts both players should choose the distribution with the higher variance of random shock, as this minimizes equilibrium effort. We show that the effort exerted is sensitive towards risk. The agents exert less effort if the random shock is high. However, agents do not learn to commit themselves by choosing a high risk in our experiment.
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