The impact of stress on tournament entry

Thomas Buser, Anna Dreber and Johanna Mollerstrom ()
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Johanna Mollerstrom: George Mason University, Research Institute for Industrial Economics

Experimental Economics, 2017, vol. 20, issue 2, No 10, 506-530

Abstract: Abstract 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.

Keywords: Competition; Gender differences; Experiment; Cortisol; Stress (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C90 C91 J16 J71 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2017
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Citations: View citations in EconPapers (42)

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DOI: 10.1007/s10683-016-9496-x

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