The effect of objective feedback on performance is often studied, while subjective feedback is largely neglected in the economics literature. We estimate the impact of positive subjective feedback - encouragement and praise - on effort and performance, and compare the effect by gender. We use a...

We study the impact of the gender composition of a scoreboard on the persistence and performance of players in an online game. Players were randomly selected into eight groups, defined along two dimensions: they saw high or average scores on a scoreboard (score level), and within each of these,...