Abstract Individuals experience an increasing amount of distractions in educational and professional settings. I use an incentivized lab experiment to study the effect of auditory and task-switching distractions on performance and mental well-being and the preferences for working under these two types of distractions. I obtain four main results. First, I find that task-switching distraction reduces total earnings, but not auditory distraction. Second, I show that the presence of either type of distraction is detrimental to individuals' self-reported mental well-being and the heterogeneity in mental well-being can be partially captured by some of my simple survey questions. Third, individuals are willing to pay more to avoid task-switching distraction than auditory distraction. Finally, I find that women and men are equally good at handling distractions in terms of both performance and mental well-being but women are willing to pay less to avoid both types of distractions.
with Thomas Buser and Roel van Veldhuizen
Management Science, forthcoming
Many professional and educational settings require individuals to be willing and able to perform under time pressure. We use a lab experiment to elicit preferences for working under time pressure in an incentivized way by eliciting the minimum additional payment participants require to complete a cognitive task under various levels of time pressure versus completing it without pressure. We make three main contributions. First, we document that participants are averse to working under time pressure on aggregate. Second, we show that there is substantial heterogeneity in the degree of time pressure aversion across individuals and that these individual preferences can be partially captured by simple survey questions. Third, we elicit these questions in a survey of bachelor students and show that time pressure preferences correlate with future career plans. Our results indicate that individual differences in time pressure aversion could be an influential factor in determining labor market outcomes.