Always doing your best? Effort and performance in dynamic settings

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 that defines the importance of a task and 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 of achieving the final outcome. We also find no evidence of choking under pressure and stress, as proxied by electrophysiological measures. AbstractAchieving 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 that defines the importance of a task and 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 of achieving the final outcome. We also find no evidence of choking under pressure and stress, as proxied by electrophysiological measures. JEL Classification: C72, C92, D81.

Artificial Intelligence, Ethics, and Intergenerational Responsibility

“…Finally, Corgnet et al (2019) show that social incentives are reduced when replacing human team members with robots. In general, one novelty of our paper is to introduce the AI not as an opponent in a strategic situation (in contrast also to Houy et al, 2020) but as a third-party observer that evaluates and learns from others' behavior and uses it for out-of-sample prediction and decision making.…”

Artificial Intelligence, Ethics, and Diffused Pivotality

“…In this literature, robots were mainly introduced to isolate the role of social preferences when studying strategic decision making (e.g., Houser and Kurzban, 2002;Ferraro et al, 2003;Yamakawa et al, 2016), to create a social preferences vacuum chamber frequently raised critic in the domain of predictive justice, for example, where conformity might replace the judge's personal conviction. (Benndorf et al, 2020), to eliminate the opponent's strategic behavior in a competition (Houy et al, 2020), or to isolate the role of social incentives in teams (Corgnet et al, 2019).…”