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International audienceStakes affect aggregate performance in a wide variety of settings. At the individual level, we define the critical ability as an agent's ability to adapt performance to the importance of the situation. We identify individual critical abilities of professional tennis players, relying on point-level data from twelve years of the US Open tournament. We establish persistent heterogeneity in critical abilities. We find a significant statistical relationship between identified critical abilities and overall career success, which validates the identification procedure and suggests that response to pressure is a significant factor for success

Page 114, Figure 3.3.5 b): The entry in the position (2, 1) of the table, corresponding to the strategy profile (MH, MM), should be (65, 75) instead of (75, 65).

We model the role of commitment in noncooperative games by means of what we call unilateral commitments. We study their impact within the framework of repeated games with complete information. To do so, we revisit the main folk theorems for repeated games with complete information and check up to what extent the assumptions needed in the classic models can be relaxed in the model with unilateral commitments.

In this paper we bring a novel approach to the theory of tournament rankings. We combine two different theories that are widely used to establish rankings of populations after a given tournament. First, we use the statistical approach of paired comparison analysis to define the performance of a player in a natural way. Then, we determine a ranking (and rating) of the players in the given tournament. Finally, we show, among other properties, that the new ranking method is the unique one satisfying a natural consistency requirement.

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 which 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. We provide a theoretical model to guide the empirical analysis. The model 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. As predicted, we also find that psychological effects are stronger when the competing subjects are more similar in cognitive skills. We conclude that these elements affect cognitive performance in the face of experience, competition, and high stakes. * We thank

We present a new allocation rule for the class of games with a nonempty core: the core-center. This allocation rule selects a centrally located point within the core of any such game. We provide a deep discussion of its main properties.

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