Decision Under Psychological Pressure: The Shooter's Anxiety at the Penalty Kick.

Summary The paper studies sequences of penalty kicks during football shout-outs in French cup competitions. We seek to analyze in detail the psychological effects to which the kicker responds: fear of winning, fear of losing, expected outcomes or how much is at stake. The main conclusion of our study is that the performance (the probability of scoring) is impacted negatively by both what is at stake (the impact of my scoring on the expected probability that my team eventually wins) and by the difficulty of the situation (the ex ante probability of my team eventually losing). We find no advantage for a team to take the first kick.