A new experiment is challenging one of the most persistent assumptions in behavioral economics: that women are naturally less willing than men to compete for the highest-paying jobs. In a study published in Theory and Decision, researchers found that women competed just as strongly as men—and in some situations bid more aggressively—for prestigious top positions. The result stands out because it contradicts a familiar pattern reported in earlier laboratory studies, where women were often more likely to decline opportunities to compete. According to the researchers, the difference may not lie in how competitive women and men are, but in how competition has traditionally been measured. When competitiveness is reduced to a simple choice between entering or avoiding a short, effort-based contest, important motivations may be left out. The new study uses an auction-like workplace model to examine what people are truly willing to sacrifice to secure a better position.
Previous experiments commonly relied on “real-effort” tasks, such as solving problems, producing answers, or completing repetitive activities under time pressure. Participants were typically asked whether they wanted to compete for a fixed monetary reward or accept a safer payment without entering the contest. These designs generated a widely repeated conclusion: women, on average, chose competitive environments less frequently than men. Andrej Angelovski, Associate Professor in Economics at the International Business School Suzhou at Xi’an Jiaotong-Liverpool University, says that this conclusion may reflect the unusual nature of the experimental setting rather than a fundamental difference in ambition. A short contest requiring participants to perform a task in front of others is not necessarily equivalent to pursuing a senior position in an organization. Real careers involve salaries, promotion ladders, opportunity costs, and strategic decisions about how much time, income, and energy to invest. The researchers therefore developed a framework intended to capture the economic trade-offs behind competition rather than competition as a personality label.
In the experiment, participants took part in a 32-round auction for jobs arranged at different organizational levels, each with its own fixed salary. Instead of performing a task directly, they submitted bids in Experimental Currency Units, or ECU. A bid represented the maximum amount of resources a participant was prepared to surrender from the salary attached to a position in order to obtain it. Those resources can be interpreted broadly as effort, training, time, stress, or other costs associated with reaching a desired career level. The conversion rate was 10 ECU for one euro, allowing the abstract decisions to become real financial consequences at the end of the experiment. Participants were not simply asked whether they wanted to compete. They had to reveal how much the position was worth to them after accounting for the cost of winning it. This structure made it possible to compare not only who entered competition, but also the intensity of the sacrifice each person was willing to make.
The researchers used a second-price auction mechanism, a system designed to encourage truthful bidding. The highest bidder won the position but paid the second-highest bid submitted within the group, rather than paying their own full bid. In economic theory, this format can reduce the incentive to manipulate a bid strategically: a participant’s best approach is generally to state the maximum amount the position is genuinely worth to them. The winner’s final payoff was calculated by subtracting the auction price from the position’s fixed salary. Participants who failed to obtain a job received a default payment of 50 ECU. This distinction was critical. A person could win the most desirable position yet earn little after paying the competitive price, while another participant could select a middle position and retain substantially more of its salary. The experiment therefore measured competitiveness through revealed willingness to sacrifice, not merely through a declaration of confidence or a decision to enter a contest.
The simulated companies differed in their salary structures. In flatter firms, the financial gap between the lowest and highest positions was relatively small. In steeper firms, the top position offered a much larger salary advantage over lower levels. The experiment unfolded in two stages. During the first phase, groups of four participants competed within their own firm. In the second, two groups merged into a larger market of eight people, allowing participants to compete for any available position across a broader field. This design enabled the researchers to observe how gender-related patterns changed when the competitive environment became more crowded and when the rewards associated with promotion varied. It also created a setting in which participants had to weigh the value of a position against the number of rivals, the likely price of victory, and the possibility that an apparently attractive promotion could produce a disappointing financial return.
The central finding was that women did not display the lower level of competitiveness often reported in earlier experiments. Across the auction environment, women behaved as competitively as men and, in some cases, more aggressively. The overall pattern was not that one gender consistently outbid the other. Instead, both women and men tended to underbid for the top positions relative to the theoretical value of the salary advantage, while showing a stronger preference for middle positions. The researchers found no large general difference in the willingness of women and men to compete. Yet one striking detail emerged in flatter companies: women supplied most of the highest bids for the top positions. That result suggests that gender differences may depend strongly on the design of the workplace and on what is at stake. A single measure of “competitiveness” may therefore conceal several distinct behaviors, including risk-taking, strategic restraint, ambition, and willingness to absorb the costs of advancement.
The experiment also revealed an economic paradox at the top of the hierarchy. The highest-ranking jobs carried the largest salaries, but competition for them was so intense that winners often bid away almost the entire salary advantage. Once the auction cost was deducted, people who secured the top position were not necessarily better off than those who obtained a middle position. In some cases, they ended up worse off. By contrast, winners of middle positions consistently earned more than the 50 ECU benchmark. The finding illustrates a phenomenon economists describe as overbidding or dissipative competition: individuals spend resources to win a prize, and the spending can eliminate much of the prize’s value. The top job may still appear desirable, but its net financial benefit can vanish when too many people fight for it. Importantly, the participants were not publicly rewarded with status for winning. They were not told who had secured the top position, and no one else could observe their result, reducing the likelihood that social recognition explained the aggressive bidding.
These results have implications beyond the laboratory, although the researchers emphasize that the experiment examined only one side of the labor market. It measured individuals’ decisions and perceptions—the supply side of competition—but did not test employers’ behavior, discrimination, workplace culture, access to networks, family responsibilities, promotion rules, or institutional barriers. Those factors can influence who reaches senior positions in the real world even when women are equally willing to compete. The study therefore does not claim that every gender gap in leadership has been explained, nor that workplace competition operates exactly like an auction. Its narrower conclusion is more consequential: a shortage of women in top positions cannot automatically be attributed to women lacking the desire to reach them. If women are willing to make comparable sacrifices for advancement, differences in representation may arise later in the process, including in selection, evaluation, sponsorship, pay structures, or the distribution of opportunities.
For Angelovski and his co-authors, the broader lesson is that scientific conclusions can depend heavily on the tools used to measure human behavior. A person who declines a timed arithmetic contest may still be highly motivated to obtain a senior job, especially when the job’s salary, responsibilities, and long-term consequences are made explicit. By treating competitiveness as a measurable economic sacrifice, rather than as a simple decision to enter a contest, the study produces a markedly different picture of gender and ambition. It also exposes a warning for organizations: intense striving for the top may not always improve employees’ welfare or productivity if promotion systems encourage destructive bidding wars. The findings invite a reassessment of the claim that women need to become more competitive to succeed. They suggest instead that many women are already prepared to compete—and that understanding who reaches the top requires examining the rules, incentives, and gatekeepers that determine how competition is converted into careers.
Subject of Research: People
Article Title: Bidding for better jobs: an experiment on gender differences in competitiveness without a real-effort task
News Publication Date: 28-May-2026
Web References: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11238-026-10132-9
References: Andrej Angelovski, Jordi Brandts and Werner Güth, “Bidding for better jobs: an experiment on gender differences in competitiveness without a real-effort task,” Theory and Decision, DOI: 10.1007/s11238-026-10132-9
Image Credits: Photo by Andreea Avramescu on Unsplash
Keywords: gender differences, competitiveness, women in leadership, behavioral economics, experimental economics, workplace competition, job auctions, career advancement, salary incentives, economic decision-making
