This paper investigates in a principal–agent environment whether and how group membership influences the effectiveness of incentives and when incentives can have “hidden costs”, i.e., a detrimental effect. We show experimentally that in all interactions control mechanisms can have hidden...

We present evidence from laboratory experiments of behavioral spillovers and cognitive load that spread across strategic contexts. In the experiments, subjects play two distinct games simultaneously with different opponents. We find that the strategies chosen and the efficiency of outcomes in...

This paper investigates the possibility that people discover effective heuristics when playing similar perfect information games of varying complexity. We call this discovery experience Eureka Learning. We use a change-point analysis to identify 35 percent of our subjects as Eureka Learners.

Recent field evidence suggests a positive link between overconfidence and innovative activities. In this paper we argue that the connection between overconfidence and innovation is more complex than the previous literature suggests. In particular, we show theoretically and experimentally that...

When bidders in a corporate takeover have related resources and post-acquisition strategies, their valuations of a target are likely to be interdependent. This paper analyzes sequential-entry takeover contests in which similar bidders have correlated private valuations. The level of similarity...

The extensive form game we study has multiple perfect equilibria, but it has a unique limiting logit equilibrium (QRE) and a unique level-k prediction as k approaches infinity. The convergence paths of QRE and level-k are different, but they converge to the same limit point. We analyze whether...