IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/uwp/jhriss/v48y2013ii1p265-285.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

Peers, Pressure, and Performance at the National Spelling Bee

Author

Listed:
  • Jonathan Smith

Abstract

This paper investigates how individuals’ performances of a cognitive task in a high-pressure competition are affected by their peers’ performances. To do so, I use novel data from the National Spelling Bee, in which students attempt to spell words correctly in a tournament setting. Across OLS and instrumental variables approaches, I find that when the immediate predecessor is correct, a speller has a 13 to 64 percent greater probability of making a mistake, relative to the predecessor being incorrect. There is no evidence that the effect differs by gender and marginal evidence that it differs by experience.

Suggested Citation

  • Jonathan Smith, 2013. "Peers, Pressure, and Performance at the National Spelling Bee," Journal of Human Resources, University of Wisconsin Press, vol. 48(2), pages 265-285.
    • Handle: RePEc:uwp:jhriss:v:48:y:2013:ii:1:p:265-285
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://jhr.uwpress.org/cgi/reprint/48/2/265
    Download Restriction: A subscripton is required to access pdf files. Pay per article is available.
    ---><---

    As the access to this document is restricted, you may want to search for a different version of it.

    References listed on IDEAS

    as
    1. Oriana Bandiera & Iwan Barankay & Imran Rasul, 2005. "Social Preferences and the Response to Incentives: Evidence from Personnel Data," The Quarterly Journal of Economics, President and Fellows of Harvard College, vol. 120(3), pages 917-962.
    2. Joshua D. Angrist & Kevin Lang, 2004. "Does School Integration Generate Peer Effects? Evidence from Boston's Metco Program," American Economic Review, American Economic Association, vol. 94(5), pages 1613-1634, December.
    3. Bull, Clive & Schotter, Andrew & Weigelt, Keith, 1987. "Tournaments and Piece Rates: An Experimental Study," Journal of Political Economy, University of Chicago Press, vol. 95(1), pages 1-33, February.
    4. Jennifer Brown, 2011. "Quitters Never Win: The (Adverse) Incentive Effects of Competing with Superstars," Journal of Political Economy, University of Chicago Press, vol. 119(5), pages 982-1013.
    Full references (including those not matched with items on IDEAS)

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Pedro Bordalo & Nicola Gennaioli & Andrei Shleifer, 1969. "Stereotypes," Working Paper 154836, Harvard University OpenScholar.
    2. Jetter Michael & Walker Jay K., 2020. "Gender Differences in Performance and Risk-taking among Children, Teenagers, and College Students: Evidence from Jeopardy!," The B.E. Journal of Economic Analysis & Policy, De Gruyter, vol. 20(2), pages 1-24, April.
    3. Jetter, Michael & Walker, Jay K., 2018. "The gender of opponents: Explaining gender differences in performance and risk-taking?," European Economic Review, Elsevier, vol. 109(C), pages 238-256.
    4. Czibor, Eszter & Onderstal, Sander & Sloof, Randolph & van Praag, C. Mirjam, 2020. "Does relative grading help male students? Evidence from a field experiment in the classroom," Economics of Education Review, Elsevier, vol. 75(C).
    5. Pedro Bordalo & Katherine Coffman & Nicola Gennaioli & Andrei Shleifer, 2016. "Stereotypes," The Quarterly Journal of Economics, President and Fellows of Harvard College, vol. 131(4), pages 1753-1794.
      • Pedro Bordalo & Katherine Coffman & Nicola Gennaioli & Andrei Shleifer, "undated". "Stereotypes," Working Paper 373306, Harvard University OpenScholar.
      • Pedro Bordalo & Nicola Gennaioli & Andrei Shleifer, 2014. "Stereotypes," NBER Working Papers 20106, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.
      • Pedro Bordalo & Katherine Coffman & Nicola Gennaioli & Andrei Shleifer, "undated". "Stereotypes," Working Paper 467407, Harvard University OpenScholar.
      • Pedro Bordalo & Katherine Coffman & Nicola Gennaioli & Andrei Shleifer, 2014. "Stereotypes," Working Paper 200246, Harvard University OpenScholar.
    6. Daniel C. Hickman & Neil E. Metz, 2018. "Peer Effects In A Competitive Environment: Evidence From The Pga Tour," Economic Inquiry, Western Economic Association International, vol. 56(1), pages 208-225, January.
    7. Jetter, Michael & Walker, Jay K., 2017. "Gender Differences in Competitiveness and Risk-Taking among Children, Teenagers, and College Students: Evidence from Jeopardy!," IZA Discussion Papers 11201, Institute of Labor Economics (IZA).
    8. Francesca Gioia, 2019. "Incentive schemes and peer effects on risk behaviour: an experiment," Theory and Decision, Springer, vol. 87(4), pages 473-495, November.
    9. Li, Teng & Lu, Runjing, 2022. "Social undermining as a dark side of symbolic awards: Evidence from a regression discontinuity design," Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, Elsevier, vol. 173(C).
    10. Essl, Andrea & Jaussi, Stefanie, 2017. "Choking under time pressure: The influence of deadline-dependent bonus and malus incentive schemes on performance," Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization, Elsevier, vol. 133(C), pages 127-137.
    11. Jetter, Michael & Walker, Jay K., 2016. "Gender in Jeopardy!: The Role of Opponent Gender in High-Stakes Competition," IZA Discussion Papers 9669, Institute of Labor Economics (IZA).

    Most related items

    These are the items that most often cite the same works as this one and are cited by the same works as this one.
    1. Kato, Takao & Shu, Pian, 2016. "Competition and social identity in the workplace: Evidence from a Chinese textile firm," Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization, Elsevier, vol. 131(PA), pages 37-50.
    2. Heather Antecol & Ozkan Eren & Serkan Ozbeklik, 2016. "Peer Effects in Disadvantaged Primary Schools: Evidence from a Randomized Experiment," Journal of Human Resources, University of Wisconsin Press, vol. 51(1), pages 95-132.
    3. List, John A. & Rasul, Imran, 2011. "Field Experiments in Labor Economics," Handbook of Labor Economics, in: O. Ashenfelter & D. Card (ed.), Handbook of Labor Economics, edition 1, volume 4, chapter 2, pages 103-228, Elsevier.
    4. Amalia R. Miller & Ragan Petrie & Carmit Segal, 2019. "Does Workplace Competition Increase Labor Supply? Evidence from a Field Experiment," NBER Working Papers 25948, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.
    5. Graff, Frederik & Grund, Christian & Harbring, Christine, 2021. "Competing on the Holodeck - The effect of virtual peers and heterogeneity in dynamic tournaments," Journal of Behavioral and Experimental Economics (formerly The Journal of Socio-Economics), Elsevier, vol. 90(C).
    6. Loukas Balafoutas & E. Glenn Dutcher & Florian Lindner & Dmitry Ryvkin, 2017. "The Optimal Allocation Of Prizes In Tournaments Of Heterogeneous Agents," Economic Inquiry, Western Economic Association International, vol. 55(1), pages 461-478, January.
    7. Frimmel, Wolfgang & Horvath, Thomas & Schnalzenberger, Mario & Winter-Ebmer, Rudolf, 2018. "Seniority wages and the role of firms in retirement," Journal of Public Economics, Elsevier, vol. 164(C), pages 19-32.
    8. Tor Eriksson & Sabrina Teyssier & Marie‐Claire Villeval, 2009. "Self‐Selection And The Efficiency Of Tournaments," Economic Inquiry, Western Economic Association International, vol. 47(3), pages 530-548, July.
    9. De Paola, Maria & Gioia, Francesca & Scoppa, Vincenzo, 2018. "The adverse consequences of tournaments: Evidence from a field experiment," Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization, Elsevier, vol. 151(C), pages 1-18.
    10. Michael Babington & Sebastian J. Goerg & Carl Kitchens, 2020. "Do Tournaments With Superstars Encourage or Discourage Competition?," Journal of Sports Economics, , vol. 21(1), pages 44-63, January.
    11. Thomas Dohmen & Armin Falk, 2011. "Performance Pay and Multidimensional Sorting: Productivity, Preferences, and Gender," American Economic Review, American Economic Association, vol. 101(2), pages 556-590, April.
    12. Mario Lackner & Rudi Stracke & Uwe Sunde & Rudolf Winter-Ebmer, 2015. "Are Competitors Forward Looking in Strategic Interactions? Evidence from the Field," CDL Aging, Health, Labor working papers 2015-09, The Christian Doppler (CD) Laboratory Aging, Health, and the Labor Market, Johannes Kepler University Linz, Austria.
    13. Murphy, Richard & Weinhardt, Felix, 2020. "Top of the Class: The Importance of Ordinal Rank," EconStor Open Access Articles and Book Chapters, ZBW - Leibniz Information Centre for Economics, vol. 87(6), pages 2777-2826.
    14. Jonathan Guryan & Kory Kroft & Matthew J. Notowidigdo, 2009. "Peer Effects in the Workplace: Evidence from Random Groupings in Professional Golf Tournaments," American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, American Economic Association, vol. 1(4), pages 34-68, October.
    15. Dimant, Eugen, 2015. "On Peer Effects: Behavioral Contagion of (Un)Ethical Behavior and the Role of Social Identity," MPRA Paper 68732, University Library of Munich, Germany.
    16. Charness, Gary & Kuhn, Peter, 2011. "Lab Labor: What Can Labor Economists Learn from the Lab?," Handbook of Labor Economics, in: O. Ashenfelter & D. Card (ed.), Handbook of Labor Economics, edition 1, volume 4, chapter 3, pages 229-330, Elsevier.
    17. Brian Hill, 2014. "The Heat Is On," Journal of Sports Economics, , vol. 15(4), pages 315-337, August.
    18. Balafoutas, Loukas & Faravelli, Marco & Fornwagner, Helena & Sheremeta, Roman, 2023. "Conflict in the pool: A field experiment," Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization, Elsevier, vol. 215(C), pages 60-73.
    19. Stephen Gibbons & Shqiponja Telhaj, 2016. "Peer Effects: Evidence from Secondary School Transition in England," Oxford Bulletin of Economics and Statistics, Department of Economics, University of Oxford, vol. 78(4), pages 548-575, August.
    20. Hong, Fuhai & Hossain, Tanjim & List, John A., 2015. "Framing manipulations in contests: A natural field experiment," Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization, Elsevier, vol. 118(C), pages 372-382.

    More about this item

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:uwp:jhriss:v:48:y:2013:ii:1:p:265-285. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    If CitEc recognized a bibliographic reference but did not link an item in RePEc to it, you can help with this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: the person in charge (email available below). General contact details of provider: http://jhr.uwpress.org/ .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.