Gender differences in equilibrium play and strategic sophistication variability

Abstract

We investigate the existence of gender differences in strategic sophistication in two weakly dominance solvable games where a prize is at stake. The first one is the two-person beauty contest, where strategies are numbers and players must perform mathematical operations. The second is the novel “gaze coach game”, where strategies are photographs of the eye region and the two players must assign emotional states to these images. We observe that females follow equilibrium play less often in the former game but not in the latter. Males display greater strategic sophistication variability. As a result, females are underrepresented among top performers in both games.