Compete with Others? No, Thanks. with Myself? Yes, Please!

We study the willingness to compete against self and others in an experiment with over 650 participants, using a modified version of the Niederle and Vesterlund (2007) design. We show that introducing a possibility to self-compete, in addition to the standard other-competition option, increases the proportion of participants who compete by more than 60 percent, indicating that selfcompetition attracts many of those who would otherwise have stayed out of competitions altogether. This holds for both men and women. Moreover, men and women prefer self-competitions to othercompetitions, especially when they have to select one of the two types of competitions. We also document that self-competitions are perceived as more controllable than other-competitions.