Gender differences in tournament and flat-wage schemes: An experimental study

Abstract

International audienceWe present a new experiment that explores gender differences in both performance and compensation choices. While most of the previous studies have focused on tournament vs. piece-rate schemes, the originality of our study consists in examining the gender gap in the context of a flat wage scheme. Our data indicate that females exert a significantly higher effort than men in fixed payment schemes. We find however no gender difference in performance under the tournament scheme, due to a combination of two effects. On the one hand, men more significantly increase their effort when switching from a flat wage to a tournament scheme. On the other hand, when switching from the flat wage to a tournament scheme, women have less margin to increase performance since their effort was already relatively high with a flat wage. We also find that females are more likely than males to choose a flat-wage scheme than a tournament. This gap however narrows dramatically when feedback on previous experience is provided

Gender Differences in Competitive Positions: Experimental Evidence on Job Promotion

“…Our results are in line with previous experimental evidence on gender differences in the willingness to compete (e.g., Niederle and Vesterlund 2007;Croson and Gneezy 2009;Masclet et al 2015;Heinz et al 2016). 7 We find in both treatments that women send a signal significantly less often than men.…”

Gender Differences in Motivational Crowding Out of Work Performance

“…This supports the lab findings of Azmat and Iriberri (), that is, subjects generally exert positive effort under a fixed payment. It is also in line with the experimental findings of Armantier and Boly (), Charness et al (), Greiner et al (), Kuhnen and Tymula (), and Masclet et al (). The results confirm the idea that subjects working under a fixed payment also have intrinsic motivations.…”

“…This may have serious consequences for remuneration schemes whose effectiveness considerably depends on intrinsic motivation. For example, laboratory evidence shows that subjects receiving a fixed payment perform well (Armantier and Boly ; Charness et al ; Greiner et al ; Kuhnen and Tymula ; Masclet et al ), as they feel the duty to honor their contractual obligations (Ellingsen and Johannesson ; Kuhnen and Tymula ). The intuition of motivational crowding out is that financial incentives leave a mark (Gneezy and Rustichini , ) which affects the future work motivation of employees.…”

“…Word encryption tasks have been successfully applied in real‐effort experiments on gender differences (e.g., Iriberri and Rey‐Biel ; Masclet et al ).…”

Gender differences in competition and sabotage

“…While there was no performance difference in the speed test, boys improved their performance in competition whereas girls became slightly lower. Similar effects can be found in Masclet et al (2012) who report that men exert higher levels of effort in a competitive compensation scheme than women with similar ability. Although evidence points into the direction that men react stronger to competitive payment schemes than women, this finding also seems to depend on the kind of task.…”