Comparative payment schemes and tournament-style promotion mechanisms are ubiquitous in the work place. We test experimentally whether they have a negative impact on the willingness to cooperate. Participants first perform in a simple task and then participate in a public goods game. The payment...

We present evidence on the role of the social environment for the development of gender differences in competitiveness and earnings expectations. First, we document that the gender gap in competitiveness and earnings expectations is more pronounced among adolescents with low socioeconomic status...

I study how gender differences in willingness to compete evolve over time in response to experience. Participants in a lab experiment perform the same real-effort task over several rounds. In each round, they have to choose between piece-rate remuneration and a winner-takes-all competition. At...

Gender differences in voting patterns and political attitudes towards redistribution are well-documented. The experimental gender literature suggests several plausible behavioral explanations behind these differences, relating to gender differences in confidence concerning future relative income...

We use fluctuations of female sex hormones occurring naturally over the menstrual cycle or induced by hormonal contraceptives to determine the importance of sex hormones in explaining gender differences in competitiveness. Participants in a laboratory experiment solve a simple arithmetics task...

We conduct three lab experiments and use field data from the Dutch Math Olympiad to study how the gender gap in willingness to compete evolves in response to experience. The main result is that women are more likely than men to stop competing if they lose. In the Dutch Math Olympiad, this means...

Women are often less willing than men to compete, even in tasks where there is no gender gap in performance. Also, many people experience competitive contexts as stressful and previous research has documented that men and women sometimes react differently to acute stressors. We use two...

We examine how multitasking affects performance and check whether women are indeed better at multitasking. Subjects in our experiment perform two different tasks according to three treatments: one where they perform the tasks sequentially, one where they are forced to multitask, and one where...

We examine whether social preferences are determined by hormones. We do this by investigating whether markers for the strength of prenatal testosterone exposure (finger length ratios) and current exposure to progesterone and oxytocin (the menstrual cycle) are correlated with choices in social...