Is there psychological pressure in competitive environments?

•We perform a field experiment on the effect of psychological pressure in competition.•We analyze sequential tournaments with a pressure not perceived as exceptional.•We do not find support for the first-mover advantage.•We also find that psychological pressure affects performance heterogeneously. This paper provides evidence from a field experiment on the effect of psychological pressure in competitive environments. In our experiment, we analyze a setup of sequential tournaments, in which participants are matched in pairs and experience a kind of pressure that, as in most real world professional tasks, is not perceived as uncommon or exceptional. We do not find support for the first-mover advantage, while we obtain that second-movers perform significantly better under psychological pressure. Moreover we find that psychological pressure affects heterogeneously the performance of the subjects.