Like all plants, trees constantly monitor endogenous and environmental cues, and use this information to make adjustments in resource allocation, both to maximize resource acquisition and to minimize exposure to deleterious phenomena. To accomplish this, trees possess mechanisms that integrate and interpret the information provided by internal and environmental signals. Ultimately, these phenom...

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...