The Impact of Losing in a Competition on the Willingness to Seek Further Challenges

Buser, Thomas

doi:10.1287/mnsc.2015.2321

Cited by 85 publications

(59 citation statements)

References 47 publications

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“…19 For those who initially pick the piece rate, the gender difference in the reaction to positive feedback drops by 36 percent. Past studies have shown that women might perform worse after losing in a competition compared to men in the same situation (Buser, 2016;Gill and Prowse, 2014). In column 4, we control for normalised rank (that is, likelihood of winning) in each round.…”

Section: Beliefs and Performancementioning

confidence: 99%

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

Buser

Yuan

2016

SSRN Journal

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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 that girls who do not make the top 1000, and therefore do not advance to the next round, are less likely to compete again one year later while there is no effect on boys. In an additional experiment, we show that men are more likely than women to start and keep competing after receiving positive feedback. In a third experiment, we show that the gender difference in the reaction to losing is not present when winning and losing are random rather than the outcome of competition. The fact that women are more likely to give up competing after a setback may help to explain why fewer women make it to the top in business and academia. JEL: C91, D03, J01, J16

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Section: Beliefs and Performancementioning

confidence: 99%

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

Buser

Yuan

2016

SSRN Journal

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“…Losses determine a reduction in effort for women, while for men productivity is affected only when the prize at stake is large enough. Buser (2014) implements an experiment in which participants compete in a two-person tournament and after having been informed on the outcome of the competition have to decide on a performance target for a second round. He finds that while men losing the first round go for a more challenging target but perform worse in the second 5 round, women do not change their target, but lower their performance.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Gender differences in reaction to psychological pressure: evidence from tennis players

Paola

Scoppa

2017

European Journal of Work and Organizational Psychology

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Standard-Nutzungsbedingungen:Die Dokumente auf EconStor dürfen zu eigenen wissenschaftlichen Zwecken und zum Privatgebrauch gespeichert und kopiert werden.Sie dürfen die Dokumente nicht für öffentliche oder kommerzielle Zwecke vervielfältigen, öffentlich ausstellen, öffentlich zugänglich machen, vertreiben oder anderweitig nutzen.Sofern die Verfasser die Dokumente unter Open-Content-Lizenzen (insbesondere CC-Lizenzen) zur Verfügung gestellt haben sollten, gelten abweichend von diesen Nutzungsbedingungen die in der dort genannten Lizenz gewährten Nutzungsrechte. The Institute for the Study of Labor (IZA) in Bonn is a local and virtual international research center and a place of communication between science, politics and business. IZA is an independent nonprofit organization supported by Deutsche Post Foundation. The center is associated with the University of Bonn and offers a stimulating research environment through its international network, workshops and conferences, data service, project support, research visits and doctoral program. IZA engages in (i) original and internationally competitive research in all fields of labor economics, (ii) development of policy concepts, and (iii) dissemination of research results and concepts to the interested public. Terms of use: Documents in D I S C U S S I O N P A P E R S E R I E S Gender Differences in Reaction toIZA Discussion Papers often represent preliminary work and are circulated to encourage discussion. Citation of such a paper should account for its provisional character. A revised version may be available directly from the author. Using data on about 35,000 professional tennis matches, we test whether men and women react differently to psychological pressure arising from the outcomes of sequential stages in a competition. We show that, with respect to males, females losing the first set are much more likely to play poorly the second set, choking under the pressure of falling behind and receiving negative feedback. The gender differential is stronger in high stakes matches. On the other hand, when players are tied in the third set we do not find any gender difference in players' reactions: this suggests that females do not tend to choke if they do not lag behind. These results are robust controlling for measures of abilities and fitness of players, such as players' rankings, players' ex-ante winning probability, players' rest, players' and tournaments' fixed effects.JEL Classification: J16, D03, L83

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“…Similarly, succeeding at sports is often credited for building self-esteem in children which helps them perform well in other spheres, such as at school or when interacting with their peers. While the previous literature has investigated extensively the impact of relative feeback on belief updating and on goal setting and competitiveness within the same task (e.g., Eriksson et al 2009;Azmat and Iriberri 2010;Gill and Prowse 2012;Wozniak et al 2015;Buser 2016), it is almost silent on the across-task impact of feedback.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Self Confidence Spillovers and Motivated Beliefs

2018

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Abstract:Is success in a task used strategically by individuals to motivate their beliefs prior to taking action in a subsequent, unrelated, task? Also, is the distortion of beliefs reinforced for individuals who have lower status in society? Conducting an artefactual field experiment in India, we show that success when competing in a task increases the performers' self-confidence and competitiveness in the subsequent task. We also find that such spillovers affect the self-confidence of low-status individuals more than that of high-status individuals. Receiving good news under Affirmative Action, however, boosts confidence across tasks regardless of the caste status. Keywords:Motivated beliefs, spillovers, self-confidence, competitiveness, Affirmative Action, experiment JEL codes:C91, J15, M52 Self Confidence Spillovers and Motivated BeliefsRitwik Banerjee a , Nabanita Datta Gupta b , Marie Claire Villeval c Abstract: Is success in a task used strategically by individuals to motivate their beliefs prior to taking action in a subsequent, unrelated, task? Also, is the distortion of beliefs reinforced for individuals who have lower status in society? Conducting an artefactual field experiment in India, we show that success when competing in a task increases the performers' selfconfidence and competitiveness in the subsequent task. We also find that such spillovers affect the self-confidence of low-status individuals more than that of high-status individuals. Receiving good news under Affirmative Action, however, boosts confidence across tasks regardless of the caste status.JEL codes: C91, J15, M52

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The Impact of Losing in a Competition on the Willingness to Seek Further Challenges

Cited by 85 publications

References 47 publications

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

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

Gender differences in reaction to psychological pressure: evidence from tennis players

Self Confidence Spillovers and Motivated Beliefs

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