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of pressure during penalty shootouts at the FIFA World and UEFA Euro Cups. Economists ... inefficient utility outcomes (Keinan, 1987). ... 1977, Pollard, 1986).
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This is the author version published as: Savage, David and Torgler, Benno (2009) Performance pressure an empirical analysis using world and Euro cups data. In: Proceedings of the 38th Australian Conference of Economists, 28-30 September 2009, University of Adelaide, Adelaide, South Australia.

Copyright 2009 [please consult the authors]

Performance Pressure: An Empirical Analysis Using World and Euro Cup Data David A. Savage and Benno Torgler

I.

INTRODUCTION

Decision making under conditions of stress is an underexplored topic in economics, which generally focuses on normal environmental conditions. Traditional choice theory is predicated on individual rationality such that decisions are self-interested and utility maximizing. Numerous studies have shown that stress negatively impacts upon both mental and physical health. For example, this has included the exploration of causes and consequences of stress or the perception of stress in the work environment (Holt 1993). A major focus is the link between stress and illness or death. Studies have shown that shift work disrupts circadian rhythms and also causes disturbances to social living. Higher rates of mental and physical health problems are reported by employees who perceive high workloads in their jobs or those who describe their supervisor as being unsupportive (Repetti 1993). Occupational stress also accounts for high suicide rates in health-related occupations and creates additional vulnerability in jobs with a strong client-dependant relationship (Stack 2001). Early studies explored the emergency decision making process where individuals are confronted with threats of potential pain, physical injury or death (Schultz, 1966). These studies found that time and pressure seemed to be major determinants of hyper-vigilance (Janis and Mann, 1977). Several psychological studies of decision making under stress have utilized rational choice or expected utility models.

More recent work has focused on the effects of emotions on cognitive

limitations or processes involved in a decision process (Janis, 1992). It has also been shown in political psychology literature that under stress, policymakers act as “satisfiers” instead of the expected “optimizers”. Under these conditions the policymaker relies on ideological or operations principles as decision guides rather than a detailed analysis of any particular policy issue (George 1980).

This paper attempts to bridge some of the gap in the literature by investigating the impacts of pressure during penalty shootouts at the FIFA World and UEFA Euro Cups. Economists working in traditional labor environments experience difficulty isolating individual work performance indicators. This makes it much harder to measure the stress effect on an individual‟s work performance. Alternatively sports data provides easily identifiable performance measures, resulting in clearer investigations of the impact of stress and pressure on individual performances. Football games, as opposed to other sports, provide the interesting characteristic of low scoring games. This results in penalty kicks playing decisive roles in determining the success of a team in competitions like the World or Euro Cups (Morva et al. 2003). Anecdotal evidence based on autobiographies suggests that the stress associated with performing these kicks in major international tournaments is immense (Jordet et al., 2007). Interestingly many coaches do not include specific penalty drill in their training routines as they believe the shot process to be an entirely random process (Bonizzoni 1998). If stress is found to be a significant determinant of success which would indicate two interesting results: Firstly that penalty kicks are indeed not a random process; secondly and more importantly that stress clearly does have a significant impact on the decision process. These results can then hopefully be translated back to the traditional labor markets allowing economic analysis in less defined conditions.

II.

MOTOVATION

A central concept of microeconomic theory is that of choice. Through the analysis of individual choices it is possible to determine the preferences and utility gained from a choice or set of choices. Traditional economic models assume that utility-maximization is obtained when individuals act rationally and pursue their own self-interest. Requiring the individual to be able to weight and compare the choices, thus determining which will return the greatest utility. However, experiments show a clear tendency for individuals working under stress conditions to incorrectly weight options (Wright, 1974). The inability to scan alternative options and the incorrect weighting of payoffs is a break with traditional choice models by leading to inefficient utility outcomes (Keinan, 1987). As stress levels increase individuals are less able to make rational choices, leading to larger choice impairment (Meichenbaum, 2007). The choice impairment or loss of rationality should be observable in the variation between rational-utility and stressed-utility.

It is inefficient choices that illustrate the costly effects of stress in terms of individual athletic performance (Driskell et al., 2001). Because of this considerable effort has been devoted to developing methods to overcome or minimize the negative effects. These methods include Stress Inoculation Training (SIT) and Decision Training (DT). SIT is based upon the disease inoculation concept: by exposing the athlete‟s to a milder form of stress it can improve the coping mechanism. Either making the athlete immune to or reduce the effect of possible future stressors (Meichenbaum, 2007). SIT is not a specific training concept or regime but is an integrated approach to reducing the athlete‟s stress effects within the normal training program (Driskell et al., 2001). DT is a training regime that attempts to remove the decision element from athletic motor skill functions via repetitive training programs. DT is derived from the Gestalt concept where the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. Such that training needs to include environmental and situational stressors as part of the system (Vickers et al., 1998). Research shows that using this pedagogy takes longer to acquire the initial skill sets but display higher skill levels under stress conditions. This training concept has been applied to areas outside of sport such as medical training procedures. Finding that DT improves skill retention rates and better ability under real stress conditions using specialist medical equipment (Thuraisingam et al., 2006). The concept of stress is used to cover conditions of a physical, biological, or psychological nature that strain organisms often beyond their powers to adapt. Research investigations have identified two distinct subsets of stressors that influence the decision making process: TaskRelated and Ambient Stressors (Cannon-Bowers and Salas, 1998). Although this investigation was done specifically for the US military the stress factors are consistent with other research findings. The stress factors include: work & time pressure; auditory overload & interference; performance pressure and fatigue & sustained operations. Additional stressors can include: extremes of temperature; extreme heavy or prolonged workloads; and social pressures (Bourne and Yaroush, 2003). When stress exceeds a threshold level and performance is being detrimentally affected psychology research defines two stages of extreme stress and their impacts. The two levels are known as the „choking‟ and „panicking‟ stages. Choking behavior occurs when the individual shifts from automatic, reactive, repetition of well-learned highly practiced skills into the much more laborious and time consuming step-by-step thought process where the athlete over-thinks the situation and as such the performance is much slower. Worse still is the panic response, in a state of panic the individual‟s behavior reverts to primitive maladaptive instinctive thinking

(Epstein and Katz, 1992). The panicked athlete focuses or obsesses on singular aspects and neglects all else. The investigation of USS Vincennes downing of an Iran Air passenger flight found that the US Officer in charge of identification was panicked. He was expecting a military craft and fixated on what he was expecting to observe. When the data he received did not fit his expectations and he ignored the data that did not fit and rationalized that which did (Collyer and Malecki, 1998). The fixation prevented him from making a rational decision even when presented with credible information. We have attempted to measure stress effects on players by constructing a number of proxies, based upon the stress factors found in the stress literature (Cannon-Bowers and Salas, 1998, Bourne and Yaroush, 2003). Noise effects from large crowds are known to induce stress effects on both referees and players (Greer, 1983, Nevill et al., 2002, Schwartz and Barsky, 1977, Pollard, 1986). Recent studies into the effects of noise on performance have found that noise levels do appear to have a significant effect on both decision making and reaction times (Kjellberg, 1990, Larsson, 1989, Kjellberg et al., 1996). These findings are in line with auditory overload and interference stressors which are driven by audience attendance at matches. For this reason we have used the crowd size as a proxy for auditory stress. It has also been shown that audience presence promotes task disruption leading to negative performance externalities because of self-consciousness (Baumeister, 1984). This effect would be exacerbated due to the massive number of TV viewers, as the number of viewers for the FIFA World Cup finals can exceed 700 million. This would indicate that events like the Olympics and World Cups are some of the most stress toxic environments endured by athletes, due to the massive viewing audience. Players in these competitions are national representatives and as such bear an additional pressure burden of national pride. Countries that have long national football traditions and especially those national teams with outstanding national success have a greater expectation of success, increasing the pressure for players to perform (Torgler, 2004). From this we construct several proxy instruments to measure tradition and expectation. These include the duration of FIFA association (tradition) and FIFA national rankings (expectation). However, acclimation and training has been found to be valid mechanisms for displacing stress effects (Johnston et al., 1998). Acclimation can be achieved through experience, as individuals become more familiar with the working environment and skills are less impacted by stressors and make better decisions (Wright, 1974, Cannon-Bowers and Salas, 1998). From this we have constructed acclimation proxies consisting of age, experience and normal competition level. As

we are not privy to the training regimes of teams we are unable to construct any proxies in relation to this possible stress reduction activity. The relative importance of any single kick varies with factors such as game level (Round of 16, Semi-Final, Final etc) and win/loss outcome of the current kick. For penalty shots where the outcome of a single kick is a winnertake-all situation to either win or lose places a much greater stress upon players (Jordet et al., 2007). Both game level and shot outcome are related to the work pressure stressors. We have created a proxy to control for game level and another two to investigate winning kicks and losing kicks separately.

III.

DATA & EMPIRICAL RESULTS

We explore penalty shootouts in the knock-out phase of two major international tournaments, specifically the FIFA World Cup and UEFA European Cup. Rules state that when two teams are tied in an elimination game and after the extra time has expired, kicks taken from the penalty mark are used to determine the winner. Five players from each team take one shot each, if after 10 attempts the score is still tied then a sudden death approach is used. In sudden death an additional two players are selected and continues until one team finishes in front after both players have kicked (FIFA, 2008). The primary data used in this paper has been gathered through various method and sources including: FIFA Game Footage; FIFA and other Football Databases. From these sources we gathered player, game, tournament and historical data: player statistics (age, experience, etc); game statistics (scores, outcomes, crowd sizes), tournament statistics (competition, game stage, etc) and historical statistics (FIFA association, world rank etc). The proxies we have created are synthesized from the stress categories including: Auditory, Work, Performance and Social stressors. Using sports data to investigate stress effects has several advantages, including the availability of large volumes of data. Trying the gather this type of data from real labor markets is extremely difficult and problematic. Sports data is detailed and widely available, where nearly every aspect of a player is known, which can include: age; height; weight; salary; sponsors; scores; previous session records and numerous others. A sporting event can be seen as a quasi-natural field experiment, such that the participants are unaware of it being an experiment and as such behavior is seen as genuine. Experiments that are performed in an environment where the test subjects are keenly aware that their behavior is being monitored can be prone to changes in behavior such that it is difficult to generalize the results (Levitt and List, 2008). This realism provides researchers with a clear advantage over laboratory

experiments while maintaining the randomness of natural data (Reiley and List, 2007). Additionally sporting events are controlled events where participants are all subjected to the same environmental variables which can include: rules; pitch regulations; time and weather conditions (per match). This means that a large number of the exogenous factors to be controlled, allowing the endogenous factors to be investigated. The dependant variable in this model is a dummy indicating success or failure of the penalty shot (success = 1). This is modeled using a simple economic regression function Si   (   X i ) . Where Si is the success of a shot and X i are all the variables associated with Si . Due to the non-linear and binary nature of the dependant variable we use a probit regression and we calculate the marginal effects values to allow for quantitative analysis of the effects. The below table is a small selection of the regression results. Probit Pressure Shot to Win

Pressure Shot to Lose

(1)

(2)

(3)

(4)

(5)

0.817**

0.814**

0.794**

0.783**

0.796**

2.41

2.40

2.36

2.30

2.32

0.174

0.174

0.170

0.167

0.168

-1.26***

-1.26***

-1.284***

-1.31***

-1.31***

-5.73

-5.74

-5.81

-5.88

-5.84

-0.441

-0.442

-0.450

-0.460

-0.456

0.186

0.256

0.289

-0.034

0.53

0.72

0.80

-0.08

0.053

0.073

0.081

-0.010

-2.62

-2.77

-1.58

-1.46

-1.54

-0.77

-0.742

-0.781

-0.442

-0.038*

-0.041*

-1.65

-1.74

-0.011

-0.011

0.033

0.039

1.33

1.54

0.009

0.011

log Crowd Size

% of Crowd Capacity

Kickers Age

Goalies Age

Game Level

0.201 1.23 0.056

Time Fixed Effects

Yes

Yes

Yes

Yes

Yes

Obs.

325

325

325

325

325

Prob>chi2

0.0000

0.0000

0.0000

0.0000

0.0000

Pseudo R2

0.1774

0.1782

0.1841

0.1961

0.2003

Notes: z- values in italics, marginal effects in bold. The symbols *, **, *** represent statistical significance at the 10%, 5% and 1% levels, respectively.

From the results we see that the shot to win/lose variables are robust, in all specifications they remain significant (about 17% and -45% respectively). Time fixed effects have been used as the matches have occurred over a 30 year period we have, to allow for unobserved changes over this period. In this condensed results package we also observe the kickers age as being robustly significant across specifications (4) and (5).

IV.

CONCLUSSIONS

From the initial estimates seen in the previous section we observe that the effect of crowd size (auditory pressure) on performance is not significant, neither in absolute crowd size or percentage of stadium capacity. This is a little counter to the traditionally accepted literature on auditory pressure effects, but given that the tested individuals are elite athletes and would presumable have some self selection biases for success in being a top tier athlete then the results may not be all that surprising. What is unexpected is the large, significant and asymmetrical effect on performance of the final shots to either win or lose a match. The negative effect on the outcome (-45%) is much greater than the positive effect for a shot to win (+17%). This may be indicative of differing payoffs vs. risk, such that success has a much lower pay off than the anticipated cost associated with losing. We also observe that age is a significant factor in performance stressors; we observe that kickers are less likely to succeed as they age, such that the age of the kicker increases the stress effect. The effect on the goalkeepers is reversed (but not shown in the small table above), as keepers age they become more successful in preventing scoring and are less affected by the shot to win/lose pressures. Training and self selection are able to account for the majority of the stress factors involved in this experiment but they still are unable to completely differ the sudden death win/lose stress effects.

V.

REFERENCES

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