Achieving an ambitious goal frequently requires succeeding in a sequence of intermediate tasks, some being critical for the final outcome, and others not. However, individuals are not always able to provide a level of effort sufficient to guarantee success in all such intermediate tasks. The ability to manage effort throughout the sequence of tasks is, therefore, critical when resources are limited. In this paper, we propose a criterion of importance that is person- and context-specific, as it is based on how an individual should optimally allocate a limited stock of exhaustible efforts over tasks. We test this importance criterion in a laboratory experiment that reproduces the main features of a tennis match. We show that our importance criterion is able to predict the individuals’ performance and it outperforms the Morris-importance criterion that defines the importance of a point in terms of its impact on the probability of achieving the final outcome.

中文翻译：

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总是尽力而为？动态设置中的努力和表现

要实现一个雄心勃勃的目标，通常需要成功完成一系列中间任务，其中一些对最终结果至关重要，而其他则不是。但是，个人并不总是能够提供足以保证在所有此类中间任务中都能成功的努力水平。因此，在资源有限的情况下，管理整个任务序列中的工作量的能力至关重要。在本文中，我们提出了一个重要的标准，该标准是针对个人和特定于上下文的，因为它基于个人应如何最佳地分配有限的无穷努力来完成任务。我们在模拟网球比赛主要特征的实验室实验中测试了这一重要标准。