The psychology literature provides ample evidence that people have difficulties taking the perspective of less-informed others. This paper presents a controlled experiment showing that this "curse of knowledge" can cause comparative overconfidence and overentry into competition. In a broader...

We study how subjects in an experiment use different forms of public information about their opponents' past behavior. In the absence of public information, subjects appear to use rather detailed statistics summarizing their private experiences. If they have additional public information, they...