Pricing competition: a new laboratory measure of gender differences in the willingness to compete

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).