Traditionally, economic models have attributed procrastination to present bias. However, procrastination may also arise when individuals derive anticipatory utility from holding motivated, overly optimistic beliefs about the workload they need to complete. This study provides a rigorous...

Procrastination is often attributed to time-inconsistent preferences but may also arise when individuals derive anticipatory utility from holding optimistic beliefs about their future effort costs. This study provides a rigorous empirical test for this notion of ‘motivated procrastination’....

Evidence from hypothetical scenarios strongly suggests the existence of a sunk cost bias, the tendency to ‘throw good money after bad money.’ However, the few studies using incentives are inconclusive. In addition, evidence on potential psychological channels underlying such a bias is...

This paper studies information transmission in a two-sender, multidimensional cheap talk setting where there are exogenous constraints on the (convex) feasible set of policies for the receiver and where the receiver is uncertain about both the directions and the magnitudes of the senders' bias...

We test the hypothesis that strategic interactions foster overconfidence. We experimentally compare an environment where players have an incentive to overstate their own ability to deter competitors, with one where this incentive is removed. We find that overconfidence persists in the former...

This paper uses a laboratory experiment to analyze how individuals resolve an exploration versus exploitation trade-off. The experiment implements a single-agent exponential bandit model. We find that, as predicted, subjects respond to changes in the prior belief, safe action, and discount...

This paper extends choice theory by allowing for the interaction between cognitive costs and imitative dynamics. The authors experimentally investigate the role of imitation when participants face a task which is costly in cognitive terms. In order to disentangle different choice dynamics, they...

Our study analyzes theories of learning for strategic interactions in networks. Participants played two of the 2 x 2 games used by Selten and Chmura (2008). Every participant played against four neighbors and could choose a different strategy against each of them. The games were played in two...