Indoor Air Quality and Strategic Decision Making

Steffen Künn (), Juan Palacios () and Nico Pestel ()
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Steffen Künn: Research Centre for Education and the Labour Market, Maastricht University, 6200 MD Maastricht, Netherlands; Institute of Labor Economics, 53113 Bonn, Germany; School of Business and Economics, Department of Economics, Maastricht University, 6211 LM, Maastricht, Netherlands
Juan Palacios: Institute of Labor Economics, 53113 Bonn, Germany; Center for Real Estate, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, Massachusetts 02139; School of Business and Economics, Department of Finance, Maastricht University, 6211 LM, Maastricht, Netherlands
Nico Pestel: Research Centre for Education and the Labour Market, Maastricht University, 6200 MD Maastricht, Netherlands; Institute of Labor Economics, 53113 Bonn, Germany; Center of Economic Studies CESifo, 81679 Munich, Germany

Management Science, 2023, vol. 69, issue 9, 5354-5377

Abstract: Decision making on the job is becoming increasingly important in the labor market, in which there is an unprecedented rise in demand for workers with problem-solving and critical-thinking skills. This paper investigates how indoor air quality affects the quality of strategic decision making based on data from official chess tournaments. Our main analysis relies on a unique data set linking the readings of air-quality monitors inside the tournament room to the quality of 30,000 moves, each of them objectively evaluated by a powerful artificial intelligence–based chess engine. The results show that poor indoor air quality hampers players’ decision making. We find that an increase in the indoor concentration of fine particulate matter (PM 2.5 ) by 10 μ g / m 3 (corresponding to 75% of a standard deviation in our sample) increases a player’s probability of making an erroneous move by 26.3%. The decomposition of the effects by different stages of the game shows that time pressure amplifies the damage of poor air quality to the players’ decisions. We implement a number of robustness checks and conduct a replication exercise with analogous move-quality data from games in the top national league showing the strength of our results. The results highlight the costs of poor air quality for highly skilled professionals faced with strategic decisions under time pressure.

Keywords: indoor air quality; pollution; strategic decision making; chess (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2023
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