Research Information System
Quality and Quantity, 2025 (Scopus)
As an alternative approach, experimental economics can provide valuable insights to understanding gender wage gap. The purpose of this pilot study is to explore the internal factors such as attitudes towards competition and risk that contribute to the gender wage gap, utilizing experimental economics methods. To investigate the possibility of learned behavior contributing to these tendencies, the sample consists of students between the ages of 5–6 and 13–14 who attend both private and public schools in Istanbul. Both of these age groups are assigned tasks in the context of experimental economics. The empirical results show that the competition tendencies of girls and boys are equal in the 5–6- years-olds. For the 13–14-year-olds, the competition tendency of girls is relatively low compared to boys. This difference is considerably small, and it is not statistically significant. Moreover, gambling is used to identify the participants’ risk attitudes. According to the results, in the 13–14-year-olds, boys gain relatively more than girls. However, the opposite is true for private school students. Furthermore, although boys perform relatively lower than girls, they compete much more. Besides, the results indicate that parents with secondary or higher education do not appear to be associated with boys’ decision-making, whereas they are positively and significantly associated with competitive and risk-taking attitudes among girls.