[IRISK Research Seminar] ‘Measuring Competition Aversion’
Thursday, January 16th, 2025
2pm – 3pm in Lille campus, room E114 & on Zoom
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Speaker:
Gijs van de Kuilen – Tilburg University, Netherlands
ABSTRACT
A growing body of empirical research indicates that preferences for competition are predictive of significant economic decisions and outcomes.
For instance, individuals who dislike competition are less likely to attain higher levels of education (Buser et al., 2024), choose prestigious academic tracks (Buser et al., 2014), perform well as entrepreneurs (Berge et al., 2015), and earn higher incomes (Kamas and Preston, 2018) compared to individuals who enjoy competition.
Furthermore, observed differences in earnings between male and female employees have been attributed to gender differences in preferences for competition: female employees earn less because they are more inclined to avoid competitive environments (e.g., Niederle and Vesterlund, 2007). In this paper, we introduce a new method to measure preferences for competition and apply it to a sample of 670 respondents from the CentER LISS panel.
Unlike previous methods, our approach is robust to confounding factors such as beliefs (e.g., overconfidence) and tastes (e.g., risk preferences), and it directly identifies individual-level preferences for competition.