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...

An individual is affected by the curse of knowledge when he fails to appreciate the viewpoint of a lesser-informed agent. In contrast to a rational person, the cursed individual behaves as if part of his private information were common knowledge. This systematic cognitive bias alters many...

In this paper, we design an investment game which allows us to study the influence of selection when learning from others. Using the theoretical study of selection neglect in Jehiel (2018) as a guide, we test (i) for the presence of selection neglect in this investment context, and (ii) some...

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...

Recent behavioral models argue in favor of avoidance of instrumental information. We explore the role of information avoidance in a real-effort setting. Our experiment offers three main results. First, we confirm that preferences for avoidance of instrumental information exist, studying...

We study the evolution of an economy where agents who are heterogeneous with respect to risk attitudes can either earn a certain income or enter a risky rent-seeking contest. We assume that agents behave rationally given their preferences, but that the population distribution of preferences...

We obtain rich measures of risk preferences of poor farmers in Vietnam, and estimate structural models that capture risk preferences over different probability levels and across different domains (gains and losses). The results break radically with the previous literature on risk preferences, in...

We test the effect of the amount of information on the strategies played by others in the theoretically strategy-proof Top Trading Cycles (TTC) mechanism. We find that providing limited information on the strategies played by others has a negative and significant effect in truth-telling rates...

Epidemics tend to have a debilitating influence on the lives of directly afflicted families. However, the presence of an epidemic can also change the behaviour and outcomes of those not directly affected. This paper makes use of a short, sharp, unexpected epidemic to examine the behavioural...

This paper examines the role played by uncertainty and sunk costs on the timeseries fluctuations in industry structure as captured by the number of firms and establishments, and concentration. Using an extensive dataset covering 267 U.S. manufacturing industries over a 30-year period, our...