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...

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...

We analyze a two-player game of strategic experimentation with two-armed bandits. Either player has to decide in continuous time whether to use a safe arm with a known payoff or a risky arm whose expected payoff per unit of time is initially unknown. This payoff can be high or low, and is...

A longstanding challenge in evaluating the impact of uncertainty on investment is obtaining measures of managers' subjective uncertainty. We address this challenge by using a detailed new survey measure of subjective uncertainty collected by the U.S. Census Bureau for approximately 25,000...

A longstanding challenge in evaluating the impact of uncertainty on investment is obtaining measures of managers’ subjective uncertainty. We address this challenge by using a detailed new survey measure of subjective uncertainty collected by the U.S. Census Bureau for approximately 25,000...

Managers play a crucial role in shaping firm performance. However, we know little about how managers perform on one of their key responsibilities: managing strategic decisions. The challenge of studying the quality of these decisions is that we often only observe the outcome associated with the...

We draw on the monthly Survey of Business Uncertainty (SBU) to make three observations about pandemic-era uncertainty in the U.S. economy. First, equity market traders and executives of nonfinancial firms share similar assessments about uncertainty at one-year lookahead horizons. That is, the...

A longstanding challenge in evaluating the impact of uncertainty on investment is obtaining measures of managers' subjective uncertainty. We address this challenge by using a detailed new survey measure of subjective uncertainty collected by the U.S. Census Bureau for approximately 25,000...

Expectations affect economic decisions, and inaccurate expectations are costly. Expectations can be wrong due to either bias (systematic mistakes) or noise (unsystematic mistakes). We develop a framework for quantifying the level of noise in survey expectations. The method is based on the...

Attention to the economy plays a key role in canonical macro models, yet its empirical properties are not well understood. We collect novel measures of attention to the economy based on open-ended survey questions. Our measures are included in tailored panel surveys of German firms and...