Cognitive performance in competitive environments: Evidence from a natural experiment

• 成果类型: Article
• 署名作者: Gonzalez-Diaz, Julio; Palacios-Huerta, Ignacio
• 署名单位: Universidade de Santiago de Compostela; University of London; London School Economics & Political Science; University of Basque Country; Basque Foundation for Science
• 刊物名称: JOURNAL OF PUBLIC ECONOMICS
• ISSN/ISSBN: 0047-2727
• DOI: 10.1016/j.jpubeco.2016.05.001
• 发表日期: 2016
• 页码: 40-52
• 关键词: Cognitive performance; COMPETITION; Natural experiments

摘要

Competitive situations that involve cognitive performance are widespread in labor markets, schools, and organizations, including test taking, competition for promotion in firms, and others. This paper studies cognitive performance in a high-stakes competitive environment. The analysis takes advantage of a natural experiment that randomly allocates different emotional states across professional subjects competing in a cognitive task. The setting is a chess match where two players play an even number of chess games against each other alternating the color of the pieces. White pieces confer an advantage for winning a chess game and who starts the match with these pieces is randomly decided. The theoretical analysis shows that in this setting there is no rational reason why winning frequencies should be better than 50-50 in favor of the player drawing the white pieces in the first game. Yet, we find that observed frequencies are about 60-40. Differences in performance are also stronger when the competing subjects are more similar in cognitive skills. We conclude that the evidence is consistent with the hypothesis that psychological elements affect cognitive performance in the face of experience, competition, and high stakes. (C) 2016 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.