Tercihler, teşvikler ve cinsiyet üzerine makaleler

This thesis consists of three self-contained projects. The first chapter is co-authored with Prof. Sule Alan and Prof. Seda Ertac. The second chapter is co-authored with Prof. Seda Ertac and Assoc. Prof. Mehmet Yigit Gurdal. The third chapter is solo-authored. Chapter 1 studies cheating behavior in a large sample of elementary school children in the context of a creative performance task, in the presence and absence of performance incentives. Our data come from a sample of 720 elementary school children with an average age of 8, and contain rich information on a large set of correlates, such as risk and time preferences, IQ, gender and family characteristics. We document that children with higher IQ and higher socioeconomic status have a higher likelihood of cheating. We find that the presence of incentives for better performance does not increase cheating behavior. We also document an interesting interaction between altruism and incentives: altruistic students cheat significantly less in the presence of incentives. Chapter 2 experimentally studies individuals' willingness to pay for the authority to make risky decisions for themselves, and the willingness to take responsibility for others, as primary determinants of leadership willingness. We consider a setup involving a pair of individuals, where one individual is designated to make both parties' decisions by default. Depending on treatment, either party can express a willingness to pay to change this situation. If one's willingness to pay to make her own decision herself is positive (negative), we interpret it as a demand for autonomy (a desire to delegate). On the flip side, if one's willingness to pay to avoid making a decision on behalf of another person is positive (negative), we interpret it as a desire to avoid responsibility (a demand for authority). We find that on average, individuals are willing to pay positive amounts of money to make their decisions themselves, and incur positive but smaller opportunity costs for the right to make decisions for others. Certain individual and contextual characteristics emerge as important predictors. Notably, (1) men are more likely to demand both autonomy and authority at the same time, (2) individuals with other regarding preferences are more likely to pay to avoid taking responsibility for others' decisions when the probability of loss is high. Exploring differences between individuals' own decisions and the decisions they make on behalf of others, we find that subjects with other-regarding preferences tend to "cautious-shift" when making decisions on behalf of others. Also, we find that individuals who would like to avoid responsibility also tend to "shift" their decisions when put in a decision-making role. The results have implications for the allocation of decision-making authority in pairs and leadership. Chapter 3 experimentally investigates people's willingness to link their payoffs to others' performances in three cognitively challenging tasks that measure cognitive ability, emotion recognition, and convergent thinking, using a large-scale lab-in-field experiment on white-collar workers in private firms. After performing the three tasks consecutively, subjects were asked to nominate one employee from the same department to receive a piece-rate payment based on the nominee's performance, separately for each test. Results suggest that (1) While there are no gender differences in performances, males receive a higher number of nominations than females for the task that requires cognitive ability. (2) Females have higher cognitive empathy, and they receive a higher number of nominations than males for the cognitive empathy task. (3) Ability, age, and education levels emerge as key predictors of being chosen as a nominee. Higher ability, older, and higher-educated subjects receive a higher number of nominations. (4) Males are more likely to link their payments to males' performances for the tasks that require cognitive ability or creativity. (5) There are no gender differences in earnings, but those who nominate males for the cognitive empathy task earn less on average (6) Females are underrepresented in the nominations for both cognitive ability and cognitive empathy tests compared to an optimal case where subjects nominate one of the highest performers in the session. The results are robust to controlling for factors such as the company (or the session) size, male to female ratio in the company (or the session), as well as the friendship ties between subjects.