Abstract

There is increasing interest in the causal role of sex hormones in economic decision making in humans. Here we discuss the existing literature on sex hormone administration and economic games measuring social preferences, risk aversion and willingness to compete. Most studies fail to reject the null hypothesis of no effect. The few significant findings need to be interpreted cautiously due to lack of robustness in results across studies, limited sample sizes and researcher degrees of freedom. We also discuss potential ways forward for this literature.