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Pré-Publication, Document De Travail Année : 2016

Doing Your Best when Stakes are High? Theory and Experimental Evidence

Résumé

Achieving an ambitious goal frequently requires succeeding in a sequence of intermediary tasks, some being critical for the final outcome, and others not. Individuals are not always able to provide a level of effort sufficient to guarantee success in all the intermediary tasks. The ability to manage effort throughout the sequence of tasks is therefore critical. In this paper we propose a criterion that defines the importance of a task and that identifies how an individual should optimally allocate a limited stock of exhaustible efforts over tasks. We test this importance criterion in a laboratory experiment that reproduces the main features of a tennis match. We show that our importance criterion is able to predict the individuals' performance and it outperforms the Morris importance criterion that defines the importance of a point in terms of its impact on the probability to achieve the final outcome. We also find no evidence of choking under pressure and stress, as proxied by electrophysiological measures.
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Dates et versions

halshs-01277982 , version 1 (23-02-2016)

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  • HAL Id : halshs-01277982 , version 1

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Nicolas Houy, Jean-Philippe Nicolaï, Marie Claire Villeval. Doing Your Best when Stakes are High? Theory and Experimental Evidence. 2016. ⟨halshs-01277982⟩
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