From the Department of Evolutionary Economics: “We find that women bid significantly higher than men in their menstrual and premenstrual phase but do not bid significantly different in other phases of the menstrual cycle.”

Two economists have posted their article “Menstrual Cycle and Competitive Bidding” to SSRN. Here is the abstract, from which the sentence in the post title was taken:

In an experiment using two-bidder first-price sealed bid auctions with symmetric independent private values, we collected information on the female participants’ menstrual cycles. We find that women bid significantly higher than men in their menstrual and premenstrual phase but do not bid significantly different in other phases of the menstrual cycle. We suggest an evolutionary hypothesis according to which women are genetically predisposed by hormones to generally behave more riskily during their fertile phase of their menstrual cycle in order to increase the probability of conception, quality of offspring, and genetic variety. Our finding is in contrast to results by Chen, Katuscak and Ozdenoren (2005, 2009).

Downloadable here, if you care to read it. No doubt it makes perfect sense to the authors to equate mock “bidding” behaviors with choosing sexual partners.

–Ann Bartow