Always doing your best? Effort and performance in dynamic settings
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Always doing your best? Effort and performance in dynamic settings Nicolas Houy1 • Jean-Philippe Nicolaı¨2,3 • Marie Claire Villeval1,4 Springer Science+Business Media, LLC, part of Springer Nature 2020
Abstract Achieving an ambitious goal frequently requires succeeding in a sequence of intermediate tasks, some being critical for the final outcome, and others not. However, individuals are not always able to provide a level of effort sufficient to guarantee success in all such intermediate tasks. The ability to manage effort throughout the sequence of tasks is, therefore, critical when resources are limited. In this paper, we propose a criterion of importance that is person- and context-specific, as it is based on 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 of achieving the final outcome. Keywords Effort Critical ability Morris-importance Choking under pressure Experiment
& Marie Claire Villeval [email protected] Nicolas Houy [email protected] Jean-Philippe Nicolaı¨ [email protected] 1
Univ Lyon, CNRS, GATE, UMR 5824, 93 Chemin des Mouilles, 69130 Ecully, France
2
EconomiX-CNRS, University of Paris Nanterre, Nanterre, France
3
ETH Zu¨rich, Chair of Integrative Risk Management and Economics, Zu¨rich, Switzerland
4
IZA, Bonn, Germany
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N. Houy et al.
1 Introduction Consider a politician who is a candidate to an important election. Her final and only goal is to be elected. However, this final outcome will depend on the aggregation of the results obtained at many intermediary steps. The candidate will need to convince voters in a small town meeting but also donors in an important fundraising reception and possibly millions of voters in the final debate broadcast on national TV. The situation described above where the final goal depends on a sequence of various tasks covers most professional lives—e.g., obtaining a tenured academic appointment depends on the quality of publications but also on presentations in seminars, reviewing articles, supervising students—and also sport competitions—e.g., tennis games where the final result depends on completion of single points or penalty kicks sessions in soccer games. Intuitively, we can agree that all these intermediary steps do not have the same importance: a national debate certainly is more directly impactful on the probability of success of a candidate, while raising funds is certainly necessary. Yet, beyond intuition, we require a formal and precise definition of ‘‘importance’’ of an intermediate step for an individual. The first quantitative criterion of importance has been proposed by Morris (1977) and we
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