with Thomas Buser and Roel van Veldhuizen
Accepted at Management Science
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.
Individuals need to work under various forms of distractions in modern educational and professional settings. Some distractions require individuals to multitask, like emails and some distractions do not require a response, like workplace noises. We aim to use a lab experiment to measure the effect of different types of distractions on productivity, to study heterogeneity in handling distractions, and to elicit willingness to pay to avoid being distracted.