Does It Matter Which Effort Task You Use? A Comparison of Four Effort Tasks When Agents Compete for a Prize

Abstract

Effort tasks are commonly used to assess individual investment and performance in an experimental setting. Although the tasks used are diverse, they are typically intended to be equivalent as far as they aim to generalize beyond the specific task. We compare an induced value effort task and three real effort tasks in a contest game. Results show that there is no equivalence across tasks in relation to how risk attitude, anxiety and gender predict performance.

Keywords: effort tasks, experimental methodology, contests, induced value

JEL Classification: C72, C90, C91