The impact of stress on tournament entry

Individual willingness to enter competitive environments predicts career choices and labor market outcomes. Meanwhile, many people experience competitive contexts as stressful. We use two laboratory experiments to investigate whether factors related to stress can help explain individual differences...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Experimental economics : a journal of the Economic Science Association 2017-06, Vol.20 (2), p.506-530
Main Authors: Buser, Thomas, Dreber, Anna, Mollerstrom, Johanna
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Behavioral/Experimental Economics
Competition
Cortisol
Economic theory
Economic Theory/Quantitative Economics/Mathematical Methods
Economics
Economics and Finance
Experiment
Game Theory
Gender differences
Hormones
Individual differences
Labor market
Microeconomics
Occupational choice
Operations Research/Decision Theory
Original Paper
Salivary cortisol
Social and Behav. Sciences
Stress
Willingness
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Summary:Individual willingness to enter competitive environments predicts career choices and labor market outcomes. Meanwhile, many people experience competitive contexts as stressful. We use two laboratory experiments to investigate whether factors related to stress can help explain individual differences in tournament entry. Experiment 1 studies whether stress responses (measured as salivary cortisol) to taking part in a mandatory tournament predict individual willingness to participate in a voluntary tournament. We find that competing increases stress levels. This cortisol response does not predict tournament entry for men but is positively and significantly correlated with choosing to enter the tournament for women. In Experiment 2, we exogenously induce physiological stress using the cold-pressor task. We find a positive causal effect of stress on tournament entry for women but no effect for men. Finally, we show that although the effect of stress on tournament entry differs between the genders, stress reactions cannot explain the well-documented gender difference in willingness to compete.
ISSN:1573-6938
1386-4157
1573-6938
DOI:10.1007/s10683-016-9496-x