Beliefs and taste for competition.

Summary Recent research shows that men have a stronger taste for competition than women. This paper presents an experimental protocol highlighting the different determinants of the choice to compete: beliefs and the level of competition. We find that low-performing subjects adapt to the level of competition, which is not the case for high-performing subjects. Our experiment also shows that information is not processed in the same way by men and women: women give more weight to the information received, while men take more into account the level of competition they will face. In general, men and women deviate from Bayesian beliefs, and information about their performance makes them overly pessimistic if this information is negative (overly optimistic otherwise).