Abstract
This paper examines how financial pressure relates to decision quality in digital and physical world environments. Drawing on principles from systems engineering and behavioral economics, the approach presented here explores a series of high frequency 'real world' and online wagers from games of real money heads up poker. Each wager was evaluated and indexed by the proportion of the player's bankroll remaining at the time of the decision. Financial pressure is interpreted via multiple risk position measures, including the amount of remaining resources at the time of the decision, the fraction of resources committed, and a leverage-based resource to commitment ratio. The analysis explores whether and to what extent depleted or committed funds correlate with suboptimal playstyles for both environments. Results show that average decision quality appears to deteriorate under financial stress in virtual settings while average decision making among casino players appears to improve. These findings contribute to a more complete understanding of decision quality under economic stress and can help inform the design and engineering of both virtual and nonvirtual systems where the outcomes of such decisions are critical.