{"title":"Happiness and willingness to compete","authors":"Karl Overdick","doi":"10.1016/j.socec.2025.102365","DOIUrl":null,"url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>This paper analyses the effect of happiness on an objective measure of willingness to compete (WTC). It conducts two online experiments on 895 respondents with real-effort tasks eliciting WTC for different levels of happiness. Happiness shows no significant effect despite sufficient statistical power. I provide an explanation for the lack of an effect by analysing behavioural preferences as mediators. WTC is highly correlated with subjective competitiveness and task confidence. Happiness does not change these subjective attitudes towards competition or toward task completion (the answer to being asked how competitive one is or to how many tasks one will be able to do). In contrast, gender as a well-established factor shifts both subjective and objective WTC significantly.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":51637,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Behavioral and Experimental Economics","volume":"116 ","pages":"Article 102365"},"PeriodicalIF":1.4000,"publicationDate":"2025-03-25","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":"0","resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":null,"PeriodicalName":"Journal of Behavioral and Experimental Economics","FirstCategoryId":"96","ListUrlMain":"https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2214804325000321","RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"经济学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":null,"EPubDate":"","PubModel":"","JCR":"Q2","JCRName":"ECONOMICS","Score":null,"Total":0}
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Abstract
This paper analyses the effect of happiness on an objective measure of willingness to compete (WTC). It conducts two online experiments on 895 respondents with real-effort tasks eliciting WTC for different levels of happiness. Happiness shows no significant effect despite sufficient statistical power. I provide an explanation for the lack of an effect by analysing behavioural preferences as mediators. WTC is highly correlated with subjective competitiveness and task confidence. Happiness does not change these subjective attitudes towards competition or toward task completion (the answer to being asked how competitive one is or to how many tasks one will be able to do). In contrast, gender as a well-established factor shifts both subjective and objective WTC significantly.
期刊介绍：
The Journal of Behavioral and Experimental Economics (formerly the Journal of Socio-Economics) welcomes submissions that deal with various economic topics but also involve issues that are related to other social sciences, especially psychology, or use experimental methods of inquiry. Thus, contributions in behavioral economics, experimental economics, economic psychology, and judgment and decision making are especially welcome. The journal is open to different research methodologies, as long as they are relevant to the topic and employed rigorously. Possible methodologies include, for example, experiments, surveys, empirical work, theoretical models, meta-analyses, case studies, and simulation-based analyses. Literature reviews that integrate findings from many studies are also welcome, but they should synthesize the literature in a useful manner and provide substantial contribution beyond what the reader could get by simply reading the abstracts of the cited papers. In empirical work, it is important that the results are not only statistically significant but also economically significant. A high contribution-to-length ratio is expected from published articles and therefore papers should not be unnecessarily long, and short articles are welcome. Articles should be written in a manner that is intelligible to our generalist readership. Book reviews are generally solicited but occasionally unsolicited reviews will also be published. Contact the Book Review Editor for related inquiries.
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