Gender differences in a market with relative performance feedback: Professional tennis players

Recent studies have found that females are less competitive than men. These studies have all relied on a similar framework where individuals have little information about their relative abilities compared to other potential competitors. It has also been found that performance feedback leads to more efficient choices for students and in experimental settings. Professional athletes competing in individual sports typically have access to performance feedback and good information about the quality of their potential competitors when choosing to enter competitive tournaments. In this paper, I use data from the International Tennis Federation (ITF) on tournament entry decisions by professional players to study gender differences in tournament entry and preferences in this competitive labor market. I find that even among this highly competitive population, gender differences exist in performance and tournament entry. In terms of performance I find that men exhibit a hot hand effect that can last for multiple periods while females are affected by only their performance in their last tournament. This effect is obvious in tournament entry where both men and women are more likely to enter tournaments after doing well, but women are affected by their last tournament while men's previous performance can affect entry beyond the next tournament. The gender difference from feedback is more striking when taking into account whether individuals actually played in a tournament. In that case, higher ability females respond positively to performance from their last tournament while males do not. But both genders see similar effects from previous performance in the short-term and the effects are larger for worse ranked individuals. Thus, in very competitive settings of same-sex tournaments, females and males respond differently to performance feedback information suggesting that information has very different, gender-specific effects for competitions and may be largely dependent on the length of time that has elapsed from the competition that the feedback is coming from. (C) 2011 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.