Gender differences in a market with relative performance feedback: Professional tennis players

Game, Set, and Match: Do Women and Men Perform Differently in Competitive Situations?

“…In our most complete estimation, the marginal effect of having one additional winning encounter in the last ten matches raises the probability of winning by 3.1 to 3.3 percentage points. These results are in contrast to earlier findings by Gilovich et al (1985) and further extend works by Abrevaya (2002), Livingston (2012), and Wozniak (2012). 2 Second, the clutch-player effect emerges with force: top players perform their best in Grand Slam tournaments, arguably the most important dates of the tennis calendar.…”

“…The former effect states that when an athlete is "hot" (cold), meaning that she has performed well (badly) in immediately preceding competitions, her likelihood of performing well increases (decreases). Some research has found affirmative (Abrevaya, 2002, for bowling;Livingston, 2012, for golf;Wozniak, 2012, for tennis) and others contradictive evidence for the hot-hand effect (Gilovich et al, 1985, for basketball;Bar-Eli et al, 2006, in general).…”

“…Reasons include the clear observability of outcomes (winning or losing) and a rich set of control and background information that is not normally available in business world environments (Kahn, 2000). Tennis as a single sport provides an ideal testing ground in this context, as professional tours are separated by gender, yet prize money has been very comparable in the past and has recently been equalized in the biggest events (also see Wozniak, 2012). This paper uses all tennis matches on the main tours of every male and female tennis player who was ranked in September 2014 to analyze two major phenomena of the labor and sports economics literature: the hot-hand and clutch-player effects.…”

Do Women Give Up Competing More Easily? Evidence from the Lab and the Dutch Math Olympiad

“…These are subject to the caveats that mixed-gender competition is rare, samples are highly selective, and identification of gender differences is complicated by the fact that the competitive settings and incentives are rarely equal for male and female athletes even within the same sport. The most relevant is Wozniak (2012), who finds that the effect of prior tournament outcomes on the propensity of entering further tournaments is similar for male and female tennis players (he does find a subtle gender difference, though, in how long the effect of prior experience lasts, with men being more affected than women by outcomes further in the past). Also looking at tennis players, De Paola and Scoppa (2015) find that female, but not male, players perform worse after losing the first set.…”

How Does the Gender Difference in Willingness to Compete Evolve with Experience?

“…There is a small number of papers which look at gender differences in the reaction to competition outcomes in high-level sports. The most relevant is Wozniak (2012), who finds that the effect of prior tournament outcomes on the propensity of entering further tournaments is similar for male and female tennis players.…”