The Role of Cognitive Ability, Personality Traits and Gender in Gift Exchange Outcomes*

Controlling for cognitive ability, personality characteristics and gender effects in a gift exchange experiment, men offer higher wages compared to women, as do agents with greater cognitive ability and those scoring higher on agreeableness on the Big Five personality scale. In turn, men provide greater effort than women do. For both genders, a one standard deviation increase in agreeableness generates almost the same increase in effort as a comparable increase in wages. Further, conscientiousness plays a statistically and economically significant role in wage rates offered and effort levels provided, but the sign of this effect differs between men and women.