Periodic Reporting for period 2 - GAPINCOMPETITION (Performance uncertainty and the level of female participation on tournaments)
Reporting period: 2023-08-15 to 2024-08-14
To understand how gender gap differs in various environments, and whether information can mitigate this gender gap, the first part of the project focuses on symmetric environments between contestants when they know their own and others' skills fully but not know about the noise in the environment. In particular, by using a rank order tournament, when the performance is calculated as the sum of effort and noise, we analyze males' and females' tournament entry rates when the noise is drawn from a known or unknown distribution and when the noise is drawn once or twice (when it is drawn maximum of draws is taken into account for calculating the performance).
The second part of the project focuses on whether gender gap persists in competitive choices when there is an asymmetry between contestants. This is important since not all the competitions in real world are symmetric, we need to learn how different genders respond to asymmetry when they know the size of asymmetry. We create asymmetry in two different ways by using two components of a performance in a 2-person rank-order tournament: either one of the contestants has higher skill than other when both contestant have the same chance or when one of the contestants has higher chance than the other when both contestants have the same skill.
In the second part of the project, we analyze how males' and females' tournament entry choices differ when they have asymmetric skills controlling for noise or asymmetric noise controlling for skill compared to baseline (symmetric contest, where both contestants have the same skill and noise). In this part of the project, the noise is drawn from a known distribution. As found in the first part of the project, here, we also find that when the skills of the contestants are the same and noise is drawn similarly for both contestants from a known distribution, there is no gender gap. Furthermore, when the noise is drawn from known distribution, gender gap disappears even under asymmetry: tournament entry choices of males and females are similar when they are advantageous or disadvantageous positions for chance or skill. Then we look at how asymmetry affects tournament entry choices compared to baseline. We find that although being advantaged does not lead higher entry in asymmetric skill and asymmetric chance treatments compared to baseline, being disadvantaged decreases entry in asymmetric skill but not in asymmetric chance treatments. This behavior stems from the beliefs. Although advantaged (disadvantaged) players in asymmetric skill treatment believe that their probability of winning is significantly higher (lower) compared to symmetric treatment, these do not hold in asymmetric chance treatment.
The first part of the project contributes to the literature analyzing the role of uncertainty or ambiguity on males' and females' tournament entry choices. As far as we know, only Balafaoutas and Sutter (2019) look at the role of uncertainty and ambiguity regarding the number of winners in a tournament on the entry decisions of males and females. They find that ambiguity increases the performance of men who choose to compete but has no such effect on women. Ambiguity also increases the entry rate of men, further contributing to a gender gap in the rate at which men or women win the tournament. In contrast with their approach, our study focuses on the effects of ambiguity and uncertainty with respect to the noise component of participants’ final performances in the tournament.
The second part of the project contributes the literature analyzing the role of asymmetry on males' and females' tournament entry choices by varying the asymmetry type in two components of performance: skill or chance. Although earlier literature shows discouragement effect (decreasing effort) in tournament due to possible asymmetry in contests, none of the studies used rank order tournament and analyzed the role two different asymmetries when subjects know about the extent of the asymmetry.