Decision researchers conduct laboratory experiments of choice between real rewards, but also often rely on asking people to provide hypothetical answers to fictitious situations. Applying results from such studies to real-world situations requires understanding how decision making in cases...

This paper details the conceptual and empirical development of a 10-item scale to measure consumer competitive arousal (CCAr). Consumers experience competitive arousals in a wide variety of consumption contexts. Though the subject has been of interest in several recent studies, neither a...

Overconfidence is used to explain various instances of detrimental decision making. In behavioral economic and finance models, it is usually captured by misperceiving the reliability of signals and results in overweighting private information. Empirical tests of these models often fail to find...

The unskilled-and-unaware problem describes a negative relationship between one’s skill level and self-assessment bias: the less skilled are, on average, more unaware of the absolute and relative quality of their performance. In this paper, we study whether, and to what extent, the...

Individuals belonging to a social group make judgments about their relative standing within the group as well as about the relative standing of their group among other groups. On average, individuals exhibit overconfidence bias in both types of judgments in a variety of settings. We hypothesize,...

We study the framing effects of communication on payoffs in multiparty bargaining. Communication has been shown to be more truthful and revealing than predicted in equilibrium. Because talk is preference-revealing, it may effectively frame bargaining around a logic of fairness or competition,...

We investigate whether overconfidence is affected by superstitious beliefs and whether the effect is heterogeneous according to gender. With this aim, we run a field experiment involving about 700 Italian students. According to widespread superstitions, some numbers are considered lucky while...

This paper uses experimental data to analyze how competitive behavior is influenced by coaching and peer observation. We study behavior in a sequential contest, considering information about the effort level of subjects in other contests (observation of peers) and information about the...

Standard social choice experiments generally force subjects to make decisions about giving money to another person, but the ability to avoid information outside of the lab could lead to less altruistic or fair behavior than such experiments tend to suggest. I expand on the design of Dana, Weber,...

A recent literature emphasizes that gender differences in the labor market may in part be driven by a gender gap in willingness to compete. However, whereas experiments in this literature typically investigate willingness to compete in private environments, real world competitions often have a...