A Note on Gender Differences in Strategic Risk-Taking: An Exploratory Business Game Simulation Experiment

Strategic decisions, almost by definition, are risk-based decisions under the veil of uncertainty, or even ignorance, combining both a "fuzzy" problem domain and an ill-defined payoff structure. In such cases of ill-defined problems the decision maker's underlying attitudes and propensity towards risk will influence the evaluation and subsequent selection of a solution (Shapira, 1998). Decision makers, when confronted with uncertainty, typically restructure ill-defined problems in order to solve them (Von Winterfeldt and Edwards, 1986), and the way they are structured depends upon many personal factors (Raiffa, 1982). Some authors, for example, (e.g., Mann, 1994) have suggested that females tend to view risk as potential loss, while males associate risk with opportunity. While there is certainly substantial debate about these gender related issues, meta-analyses of gender-based research by both Arch (1993) and Byrnes et al (1999) have found important gender differences in risk taking. Understanding risk, in simple terms, starts with variation around the mean of a probability distribution; however, the theoretical measurement of risk taking propensity is extremely complex and exacting, involving estimations of individual utility curves. Strategic decisions, however, involve multiple objectives, are sequential futures oriented, and typically involve various forms of feedback. Under such conditions, other factors often bundled under the rubric of " risk-taking " , such as implicit probability setting and information-gathering behaviors become important in