Risk, Ambiguity, and the gender gap in tournament entry

Date

2026-01-01

Author

Boosey, Luke
Büyükboyacı Hanay, Mürüvvet İlknur
İntişah, Merve

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This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.

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Experimental evidence suggests that gender differences in tournament entry may be driven by differences in competitiveness, overconfidence, and risk or ambiguity attitudes. We examine the influence of risk, ambiguity, and complexity on tournament entry using a novel experimental design that mitigates the role of overconfidence. Our experiment uses a rank-order tournament with calibrated ability, ensuring that variation in subjects’ performances is driven by the random noise component. We vary the nature of uncertainty by manipulating whether the distribution of noise is known (risk) or unknown (ambiguity), as well as the complexity of the situation by varying the number of draws used to determine the noise component. We do not find any significant effects of complexity (the number of draws) on tournament entry for either kind of uncertainty. Moreover, in our risk treatments, we observe no gender gap in tournament entry. However, there is a significant gender gap in our ambiguity treatments, where the distribution of the noise component is unknown, driven by the negative influence of ambiguity on entry by women. A separate treatment-based measure of participants’ preference for competition indicates that both men and women exhibit substantial competitiveness in the risk treatments, with no difference across gender. Yet, in stark contrast, ambiguity suppresses the competitiveness of women, without impacting the competitiveness of men. Altogether, our results suggest that greater transparency to minimize ambiguity may help to mitigate the gender gap in tournament entry.

Subject Keywords

Ambiguity, Competitiveness, Experiment, Gender gap, Risk, Tournament entry

URI

https://hdl.handle.net/11511/119685

Collections

Department of Economics, Article