Gender Differences And Social Comparison In The Newsvendor Problem

Social comparison between peers may affect newsvendors' decisions,where gender moderates the affect.This paper conducts two studies to figure out the joint effects.In Study 1,it focuses on the single decision with two profit margins:high profit margin and low profit margin and analyzes the data in different genders.It finds that both male and female subjects deviate from the optimal order quantity,and male subjects perform better than female in two types of product profit margins settings.And female subjects show more biases in the prior demand than male subjects.With the linear regression,it shows male subjects are more likely to anchor their own prior quantity than female subjects.In Study 2,it uses a 3X2 experimental design:two types of product profit margins and three types of gender compositions:all subjects are male(denoted as MM),all subjects are female(denoted as FF),and half of subjects are male,another half of subjects are female(denoted as MF),in which one male subject matches one female human subject.The first two are intragroup and the third is intergroup.Each two subjects are randomly matched at the beginning of the experiment,and they can observe other's decision and profit in every experiment round.The experimental data shows that subjects can alleviate decision bias by knowing each other's decision information in intragroup context,but male subjects perform more biases when grouping with female subjects.With the linear regression,it proves that subjects do care about other's prior quantity and they tend to order more than that.And in the maximum likelihood estimation,it exhibits that subjects tend to value other's profit in a negative way when evaluate their own utility.This preference is stronger for female subjects in FF group and for male subjects in MF group.The alternative explanation of this finding and some managerial implications are discussed.