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Room composition effects on risk taking by gender

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  14 March 2025

Marco Castillo ,
Greg Leo  and
Ragan Petrie Open the ORCID record for Ragan Petrie [Opens in a new window]
Marco Castillo*
Affiliation:
Department of Economics, Texas A&M University, College Station, USA The Melbourne Institute, Melbourne, Australia
Greg Leo*
Affiliation:
Department of Economics, Vanderbilt University, Nashville, USA
Ragan Petrie*
Affiliation:
Department of Economics, Texas A&M University, College Station, USA The Melbourne Institute, Melbourne, Australia
*
[email protected]
[email protected]
[email protected]
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Abstract

We present evidence of a direct social context effect on decision-making under uncertainty: the gender composition of those in the room when making individual risky decisions significantly alters choices even when the actions or presence of others are not payoff relevant. In our environment, decision makers do not know the choices made by others, nor can they be inferred from the experiment. We find that women become more risk taking as the proportion of men in the room increases, but the behavior of men is unaffected by who is present. We discuss some potential mechanisms for this result and conjecture it is driven by women being aware of the social context and imitating the expected behavior of others. Our results imply that the environment in which individual decisions are made can change expressed preferences and that aggregate behavior may be context dependent.

Keywords

GenderDecision context effectsRisk aversionExperiment

JEL classification

C91: Laboratory, Individual Behavior D81: Criteria for Decision-Making under Risk and Uncertainty J16: Economics of Gender • Non-labor Discrimination
Type
Original Paper
Information
Experimental Economics , Volume 23 , Issue 3 , September 2020 , pp. 895 - 911
Copyright
Copyright © 2019 Economic Science Association

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Footnotes

Electronic supplementary material The online version of this article (https://doi.org/10.1007/s10683-019-09635-w) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users.

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