An extension of the volunteer’s dilemma is the promotability problem at the workplace. It roughly translates to employees letting others take up tasks that lead to low employability in favour of the ones that impact performance evaluations. E.g., a survey of Carnegie Mellon faculty revealed that an overwhelming majority (~ 90%) thought research papers and conferences were more important than offering services to the curriculum committee or faculty senate.
Going a level deeper, studies also found that women staff, on average, spend more hours on committee work than men. Babcock et al. report results from one such study, where the team examined whether men and women differ in their preference to take up tasks of low profitability.
In study 1, the researchers caught hold of data from e-mail invitations for the service for the senate committee for the 2012-13 academic year. Of the total 3271 faculty members (24.7% female), only 3.7% volunteered. Genderwise, it was 2.6% men and 7.0% women.
The second experiment was in the classical volunteer’s dilemma mould. The participants were randomly assigned to groups of 3 to complete a task in two minutes. Each team should make a volunteering decision. The volunteer gets $1.25, and the others get $2. If no one volunteers, they all get $1. There were ten rounds; women dominated from round 1, with two-thirds of the investment made in the last two seconds.
The next experiment was a single-sex version of the previous. The volunteering rates, as well as the timing, were similar to experiment 2. And the researchers, this time, found no evidence for gender preference on the probability of investing.
The fourth experiment was a modification of the second. Here a fourth member is added who can request the three players to invest. The incentives are similar to the previous. The results showed a remarkable difference: on average, women revived 2.5 more requests than men over ten rounds.
Babcock, L.; Recalde, M. P.; Vesterlund, L.; Weingart, L., American Economic Review 2017, 107(3): 714–747
