Gender Differences in Willingness to Guess
通过SAT II历史测试题实验，发现女性在有答错惩罚时比男性更少猜测答案，且知识水平和自信无差异，风险偏好只能解释不到一半的差距。
We present the results of an experiment that explores whether women are less willing than men to guess on multiple-choice tests. Our test consists of practice questions from SAT II history tests; we vary whether a penalty is imposed for a wrong answer and the salience of the evaluative nature of the task. We find that when no penalty is assessed for a wrong answer, all test takers answer every question. But, when there is a penalty for wrong answers, women answer significantly fewer questions than men. We see no differences in knowledge of the material or confidence in the test takers, and differences in risk preferences explain less than half of the observed gap. Making the evaluative aspect of the test more salient does not impact the gender gap. We show that, conditional on their knowledge of the material, test takers who skip questions do significantly worse on our test. Data, as supplemental material, are available at http://dx.doi.org/10.1287/mnsc.2013.1776 This paper was accepted by Uri Gneezy, behavioral economics.