Film studios occasionally withhold movies from critics before their release. These cold openings provide a natural setting to apply laboratory-developed models of limited strategic thinking to the field. In a set of 1,303 widely released movies, cold opening is correlated with a 10-30 percent...

In several common-value environments (e.g., auctions or elections), players should make informational inferences from opponents' strategies under certain hypothetical events (e.g., winning the auction or being pivotal). We design a voting experiment that identifies whether subjects make these...

We present a model in which an agent takes actions to affect her reputation with two audiences with diverse preferences. This contrasts with standard reputation models that consider a homogeneous audience. A new aspect that arises is that different audiences may observe outcomes commonly or...

We document individuals' willingness to pay to control their own payoff. Experiment participants choose whether to bet on themselves or on a partner answering a quiz question correctly. Given participants' beliefs, which we elicit separately, expected-money maximizers would bet on themselves in...

This paper shows that a new trade-off arises in the optimal contract when contracting takes place with vague information (objective ambiguity), reflecting that real-world contracting often takes place under imprecise information. The choice-theoretic framework captures a decisionmaker's attitude...

We study information transmission to a decision maker from an advisor who values a reputation for incorruptibility in the presence of a third party who offers unobservable payments/bribes. While it is common to ascribe negative effects to such bribes, we show that given reputational concerns,...

We analyze the design of dynamic menus to sell experience goods. The quality of the product is initially unknown, and the total quantity sold in each period determines the amount of information in the market. We characterize the optimum menu as a function of consumers' beliefs, and the dynamic...

This paper explores information disclosure in matching markets. A school may suppress some information about students in order to improve their average job placement. We consider a setting with many schools, students, and jobs, and show that if early contracting is impossible, the same,...

We study social learning by boundedly rational agents. Agents take a decision in sequence, after observing their predecessors and a private signal. They are unable to make perfect inferences from their predecessors' decisions: they only understand the relation between the aggregate distribution...

We study how competition affects market transparency, taking into account that comparative performance is assessed via tournaments and contests. Extending Dye (1985) to a multi-firm setting in which top performers are rewarded, we show that increased competition usually makes disclosure less...