This paper presents a strategic model of risk-taking behavior in contests. Formally, we analyze an n-player winner-take-all contest in which each player decides when to stop a privately observed Brownian Motion with drift. A player whose process reaches zero has to stop. The player with the...

Does gender play a role in the context of team work? Our results based on a real-effort experiment suggest that performance depends on the composition of the team. We find that female and male performance differ most in mixed teams with revenue sharing between the team members, as men put in...

We provide an evolutionary foundation to evidence that in some situations humans maintain optimistic or pessimistic attitudes towards uncertainty and are ignorant to relevant aspects of the environment. Players in strategic games face Knightian uncertainty about opponents' actions and maximize...

We study a continuous-time game of strategic experimentation in which the players try to assess the failure rate of some new equipment or technology. Breakdowns occur at the jump times of a Poisson process whose unknown intensity is either high or low. In marked contrast to existing models, we...

The paper analyzes a dynamic model of rational strategic learning in a network. It complements existing literature by providing a detailed picture of short-run dynamics in a game of strategic experimentation where agents are located in a social network. We show that the delay in information...

This paper analyzes a two-player game of strategic experimentation with three-armed exponential bandits in continuous time. Players face replica bandits, with one arm that is safe in that it generates a known payoff, whereas the likelihood of the risky arms' yielding a positive payoff is...

We consider two players facing identical discrete-time bandit problems with a safe and a risky arm. In any period, the risky arm yields either a success or a failure, and the first success reveals the risky arm to dominate the safe one. When payoffs are public information, the ensuing free-rider...

We provide several generalizations of Mailath's (1987) result that in games of asymmetric information with a continuum of types incentive compatibility plus separation implies differentiability of the informed agent's strategy. The new results extend the theory to classic models in finance such...

We analyze a two-player game of strategic experimentation with two-armed bandits. Each player has to decide in continuous time whether to use a safe arm with a known payoff or a risky arm whose likelihood of delivering payoffs is initially unknown. The quality of the risky arms is perfectly...

This paper studies strongly symmetric equilibria (SSE) in continuous-time games of strategic experimentation with Poisson bandits. SSE payoffs can be studied via two functional equations similar to the HJB equation used for Markov equilibria. This is valuable for three reasons. First, these...