Players often engage in high-profile public communications to demonstrate their confidence in winning before they carry out actual competitive activities. We investigate players’ incentives to engage in such pre-contest communication. Our key assumption is that a player suffers a cost when he...

Competition among firms has been suggested to reflect the ruthless logic of Darwinian selection: a free market is a struggle for survival, in which successful firms survive and unsuccessful ones die. This view appears to bolster three pillars of neoclassical economics: (1) that economic actors...

We experimentally investigate the difference in competitiveness of 3–5 year-old boys and girls in the U.S. 123 children from a preschool are randomly matched into girl–girl, boy–boy, and boy–girl pairs of similar age and participate in a gender-neutral, competitive classroom activity...