Time Pressure Preferences

Abstract

Many professional and educational settings require individuals to be willing and able to perform under time pressure. We use a laboratory experiment and survey data to study preferences for working under time pressure. We make three main contributions. First, we develop an incentivized method to measure preferences for working under time pressure and document that participants in our laboratory experiment are averse to working under time pressure on average. Second, we show that there is substantial heterogeneity in the degree of time pressure aversion across individuals and that these individual preferences can be partially captured by simple survey questions. Third, we include these questions in a survey of bachelor’s degree students and a nationally representative survey panel and show that time pressure preferences predict career choices and income. Our results indicate that individual differences in time pressure aversion could be an influential factor in determining labor market outcomes. This paper was accepted by Yan Chen, behavioral economics and decision analysis. Funding: This work was supported by the Jan Wallander and Tom Hedelius Foundation, European Research Council under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 Research and Innovation Programme [Grant 850590]. Supplemental Material: The online appendix and data files are available at https://doi.org/10.1287/mnsc.2023.02078 .