Happiness and willingness to compete

• Happiness shows no significant effect on willingness to compete. • I provide an explanation for the lack of an effect by analysing behavioural preferences as mediators. • Willingness to compete is highly correlated with subjective competitiveness and task confidence. • Gender as a well-established factor shifts both subjective and objective WTC significantly. This paper analyses the effect of happiness on an objective measure of willingness to compete (WTC). It conducts two online experiments on 895 respondents with real-effort tasks eliciting WTC for different levels of happiness. Happiness shows no significant effect despite sufficient statistical power. I provide an explanation for the lack of an effect by analysing behavioural preferences as mediators. WTC is highly correlated with subjective competitiveness and task confidence. Happiness does not change these subjective attitudes towards competition or toward task completion (the answer to being asked how competitive one is or to how many tasks one will be able to do). In contrast, gender as a well-established factor shifts both subjective and objective WTC significantly.