Performing best when it matters most: Evidence from professional tennis

Performing Best When It Matters Most: Evidence from Professional Tennis

Stakes affect aggregate performance in a wide variety of settings. At the individual level, we define the critical ability as an agent’s ability to adapt performance to the importance of the situation. We identify individual critical abilities of professional tennis players, relying on point-level data from twelve years of the US Open tournament. We establish persistent heterogeneity in critica...

Forecasting when it matters: Evidence from Semi-Arid India

In regions of India where cultivation is rainfed, the optimal time to plant coincides with the onset of the monsoon. In this paper, we elicit from farmers their prior beliefs about the timing of the monsoon and assess their accuracy by comparing them to historical data. We find substantial heterogeneity in beliefs and ∗Financial support from CRMG, GARP and World Bank is gratefully acknowledged....

Gender Differences in Response to Setbacks: Evidence from Professional Tennis

Motor neuronal activity varies least among individuals when it matters most for behavior.

How does motor neuronal variability affect behavior? To explore this question, we quantified activity of multiple individual identified motor neurons mediating biting and swallowing in intact, behaving Aplysia californica by recording from the protractor muscle and the three nerves containing the majority of motor neurons controlling the feeding musculature. We measured multiple motor component...

Foreign accent matters most when timing is wrong

This study aims to investigate native speakers’ perception of prosodic variation of Japanese utterances. The pitch contour above the word level is hard to determine due to individual variation or pragmatic and para-linguistic factors. Nevertheless, native speakers’ intonation is relatively consistent as long as the context and intention of the utterance is predetermined. On the other hand, L2 s...