​Economics Seminar | An Experimental Study of the Competitive Saving Motive

We use a series of laboratory experiments to study the hypothesis of the competitive saving motive proposed by Wei and Zhang (2011) and Du and Wei (2013). In a laboratory seting, we can easily change the sex ratio exogenously and consider both cases of excess men and those of excess women. We confirm the basic prediction of the hypothesis that a rise in the sex ratio leads to a rise in the aggregate savings rate but find some interesting asymmetries between men and women. We also separately identify the competitive saving motive of competing for a match, competing for a better match, and a pure hedging motive and find that the hedging induced savings is negligible while the first two are both very strong. Finally, we investigate the effect of heterogenous incomes on competitive saings, somethig that is hard to obtain analytical results in the theory. Experimental results show that a rise in the sex ration still leads to a rise in the aggregate savings rate with the presence of income heterogeneity, but the effect mainly comes from the middle income people on the long side.