Gender, Competition, and Managerial Decisions
实验室中研究经理对工人选择计件或锦标赛薪酬方案，发现了解工人能力时，男经理对女工人更少选锦标赛，可能与性别刻板印象有关。
The purpose of this study is to investigate the use of competitive compensation between a manager and a worker in the laboratory. To this end, we impose a simple agency relationship between two groups of subjects termed managers and workers. The manager chooses a compensation scheme for the worker from either a piece rate or a tournament payment scheme and is paid based on the workers performance in the task. The results indicate that when given information about worker ability, male managers choose the tournament significantly less often for a female worker. On the other hand, when no information about worker ability is given to the manager, there is no difference in compensation choice for the worker, although male and female managers differ significantly in their own preferences for compensation scheme. We conjecture that these results are tied to the fact that there is a measurable stereotype that females are worse at the task relative to males, although further research is needed in this regard. This paper was accepted by Brad Barber, Teck Ho, and Terrance Odean, special issue editors.