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Leavey School of Business Santa Clara University
Department ofEconomics

Selected Publications

Pricing Competition: A New Laboratory Measure of Gender Differences in the Willingness to Compete

John Ifcher, Homa Zarghamee

Experimental Economics 19 (3), pp. 642–662, September 2016

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Abstract

Experiments have demonstrated that men are more willing to compete than women. We develop a new instrument to “price” willingness to compete. We find that men value a $2.00 winner-take-all payment significantly more (about $0.28 more) than women; and that women require a premium (about 40 %) to compete. Our new instrument is more sensitive than the traditional binary-choice instrument, and thus, enables us to identify relationships that are not identifiable using the traditional binary-choice instrument. We find that subjects who are the most willing to compete have high ability, higher GPA’s (men), and take more STEM courses (women).

LSB Research, ECON, 2016, John Ifcher