Juan Palacios’ paper is published in Management Science

Congratulations to Juan Palacios (SUL researcher) and his coauthors, who now have their famous chess paper published in Management Science, a top journal in economics and management. It is huge achievement to be published in this journal. Juan and his coauthors have been working on this paper for at least five years.

MIT NEWS: Chess players face a tough foe: air pollution

Study Summary

Even chess experts perform worse when air quality is lower, suggesting a negative effect on cognition.

More specifically, given a modest increase in fine particulate matter, the probability that chess players will make an error increases by 2.1 percentage points, and the magnitude of those errors increases by 10.8 percent. In this setting, at least, cleaner air leads to clearer heads and sharper thinking. 

“We find that when individuals are exposed to higher levels of air pollution, they make more mistakes, and they make larger mistakes,” says Juan Palacios, an economist in MIT’s Sustainable Urbanization Lab, and co-author of a newly published paper detailing the study’s findings.

The paper, “Indoor Air Quality and Strategic Decision-Making,” appears today in advance online form in the journal Management Science. The authors are Steffen Künn, an associate professor in the School of Business and Economics at Maastricht University, the Netherlands; Palacios, who is head of research in the Sustainable Urbanization Lab, in MIT’s Department of Urban Studies and Planning (DUSP); and Nico Pestel, an associate professor in the School of Business and Economics at Maastricht University.