We investigate if, and why, an initial success can trigger a string of successes. Using random variations in success in a real‐effort laboratory experiment, we cleanly identify the causal effect of an early success in a competition. We confirm that an early success indeed leads to increased...

Overconfidence is one of the most ubiquitous biases in the social sciences, but the evidence regarding its overall costs and benefits is mixed. To test the possibility that overconfidence might yield important relative benefits that offset its absolute costs, we conducted an experiment (N=298...

For the trust game, recent models of belief-dependent motivations make opposite predictions regarding the correlation between back-transfers and second- order beliefs of the trustor: While reciprocity models predict a negative correlation, guilt-aversion models predict a positive one. This paper...

We investigate the role of intentions in two-player two-stage games. For this purpose we systematically vary the set of opportunity sets the first mover can chose from and study how the second mover reacts not only to opportunities of gains but also of losses created by the choice of the first...