Experimental Design Details
Participants in the laboratory experiment work on a cognitive task (finding two numbers that add up to a target number) for five rounds; each round consists of 10 games. In the first four rounds, we randomly vary the time limit for a given game to be either 15, 25 or 60 seconds or to have no time limit. Participants get paid 10 Euros minus 1 Euro for each game they are unable to complete.
In the fifth round, we instead ask people to choose the amount of time pressure. For this purpose, they go through several price lists in which they choose between no time limit and a starting budget of 10 Euro and a lower time limit (either 15, 25 or 60 seconds) with a starting budget that varies from 10 to 20 Euros across the rows of the price list. In addition, participants also make three choices between competing at a lower time pressure and competing at a higher time pressure against an opponent who faced the same time pressure as them. One of the decisions made in this round gets randomly implemented for all 10 games that participants complete in this round.
At the end of the experiment, one of the five rounds gets randomly selected for payment. In addition, participants go through two short questionnaires, one before and one after the main experiment. These questionnaires collect survey measures of personality traits (big-five, competitiveness and time pressure resistance) and an incentivized measure of risk preferences.