Keywords: competitiveness, gender gaps, lab experiments, social identity, stereotypes, workplace diversity

“Essays on competitive attitude; sex, stereotypes and group membership”

This dissertation pursues two fundamental objectives. Firstly, through the combination of economic experiments, economic theory, and psychology theory, it investigates motivations underlying behaviour in economically relevant competitive settings. Secondly, it uses the behavioural insights from the research to draw policy implications for the labour market. The main practical implications of this research are: i. To encourage women entering a male-dominated labour market, information in job advertisements that highlight women’s underrepresentation should be replaced by references to recent female applicants and/or existing female workers; ii. The appropriate intervention to prevent the adverse effect of stereotype threat in performance is to avoid any information referring to the stereotype; iii. To deter reckless decisions in competitive labour markets (e.g., hedge funds), we should index the bonus of workers to the performance of their peers.