The Role of Cognitive Ability, Personality Traits and Gender in Gift Exchange Outcomes

We examine the role of cognitive ability, personality traits and gender in a one-shot gift exchange experiment. Controlling for cognitive ability and personality characteristics, men offer higher wages than women do, as do agents with greater cognitive ability and those scoring higher on agreeableness on the Big Five personality scale. In turn, men provide greater effort than women do on average, and respond at higher wage rates with greater increases in effort. For both genders, a one standard deviation increase in agreeableness generates almost the same increase in effort as a comparable increase in wages. Omitting cognitive ability from the analysis, and pooling men and women, produces seriously biased parameter estimates.

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