We exploit a natural experiment in which two professionals compete in a one-stage contest without strategic motives and where one contestant has a clear exogenous psychological momentum advantage over the other in order to estimate the causal effect of psychological momentum on performance. We...

Ski jumping competitions involve subjective evaluations by judges from different countries. This may lead to nationalistic bias, according to which judges assign higher scores to their compatriots. To test this claim empirically, we exploit within-performance variation of scores from all World...

The home advantage phenomenon is a well-established feature in sports competitions. In this paper, we examine data from 1,908 soccer matches played in the German Bundesliga during the seasons from 2007-08 to 2015-16. Using a very rich data set, our econometric analysis that is based on matching...

The order of actions in contests may have a significant effect on performance. In this study we examine the role of schedule in round-robin tournaments with sequential games between three and four contestants. Our propensity-score matching estimation, based on soccer FIFA World Cups, UEFA...

The order of actions in contests may generate different psychological effects which, in turn, may influence contestants' probabilities to win. The Prouhet-Thue-Morse sequence in which the first 'n' moves is the exact mirror image of the next 'n' moves should theoretically terminate any advantage...

We exploit a unique setting in which two professionals compete in a real-life tennis contest with high monetary rewards in order to assess how men and women respond to competitive pressure. Comparing their performance in low-stakes versus high-stakes situations, we find that men consistently...