A pervasive feature in the finance industry is relative performance, which can include extrinsic (money), intrinsic (self-image), and reputational (status) motives. In this paper, we model a portfolio decision with two assets and investigate how reputational motives (i.e., the public...

Two aspects of social context are central to the finance industry: (i) financial professionals make investment decisions for customers and (ii) social competition/rankings are a pervasive feature. We link both lines of literature to investigate professionals' risk-taking behavior when investing...

We investigate how heterogeneity in contestants' investment costs affects competition expenditures in a dynamic elimination contest with different seeding variants of contestants. Theory predicts that expenditures in dynamic contests are lower when competitors are heterogeneous than when they...

This paper reports experimental tests of two alternative explanations of how players use focal points to select equilibria in one-shot coordination games. Cognitive hierarchy theory explains coordination as the result of common beliefs about players' pre-reflective inclinations towards the...

We introduce "group cohesion" to study the economic relevance of social relationships in team production. We operationalize measurement of group cohesion, adapting the "oneness scale" from psychology. A series of experiments, including a pre-registered replication, reveals strong positive...

A debate among practicing managers is whether to use cooperative or competitive incentives for team production. While competitive incentives may drive individual effort higher, they may also lead to less help and more sabotage; an issue exacerbated when team members' abilities are varied. Using a...

We study how conflict in contest games is influenced by rival parties being groups and by group members being able to punish each other. Our motivation stems from the analysis of socio-political conflict. The theoretical prediction is that conflict expenditures are independent of group size and...

While headline news frequently report cases of large-scale fraud, corruption, and other immoral behavior, laboratory experiments often show prosocial behavior in strategic games. To reconcile and explain these seemingly conflicting observations, Al'os-Ferrer et al. (2022) introduced the Big...