Entry decisions in market entry games usually depend on the belief about how many others are entering the market, the belief about the own rank in a real effort task, and subjects' risk preferences. In this paper I am able to replicate these basic results and examine two further dimensions: (i)...

Psychological pressure affects performance. This is especially true for individuals completing precision tasks in decisive situations, such as assessment tests, job talks, or sports competitions. In this paper, I shed light on detrimental effects of pressure on performance, a phenomenon known as...

Rankings are a pervasive feature of the finance industry. Although they have no direct monetary consequences, rankings provide utility for intrinsic (positive self-image) and extrinsic (status) reasons. We recruit a unique subject pool of 204 financial professionals and investigate how anonymous...

Arad and Rubinstein (2012a) have designed a novel game to study level-k reasoning experimentally. Just like them, we find that the depth of reasoning is very limited and clearly different from equilibrium play. We show that such behavior is even robust to repetitions, hence there is, at best,...

Many tournaments are plagued by sabotage among competitors. Typically, sabotage is welfare-reducing, but from an individual's perspective an attractive alternative to exerting positive effort. Yet, given its illegal and often immoral nature, sabotage is typically hidden, making it difficult to...

Tournaments are widely used in organizations, explicitly or implicitly, to reward the best-performing employees, e.g., through promotion or bonuses, and to punish the worst-performing employees, e.g., through firing or unfavorable job assignments. We use a principal-agent model to compare the...

In laboratory experiments we explore the effects of communication and group decision making on investment behavior and on subjects' proneness to behavioral biases. Most importantly, we show that communication and group decision making does not impact subjects' overall proneness to biases like...

Managers often use tournaments which motivate workers to compete for the top, compete to avoid the bottom, or both. In this paper we compare the effectiveness and efficiency of the corresponding incentive schemes. To do so, we utilize optimal contracts in a principal-agent setting, using a...