The prediction of asymmetric equilibria with Stackelberg outcomes is clearly the most frequent result in the endogenous timing literature. Several experiments have tried to validate this prediction empirically, but failed to find support for it. In contrast, these experiments find that...

This paper investigates the implications of workers' mistaken beliefs about their abilities on incentives in organisations. It shows that if effort is observable, then an agent's mistaken beliefs about his own ability are favourable to the principal. However, when effort is unobservable an...

Using a laboratory experiment we investigate how skew in uences choices under risk. We find that subjects make significantly riskier choices when the distribution of payoffs is positively skewed, these choices being driven in part by the shape of the utility function but also by subjective...

This paper studies the impact of firm and market size asymmetries on merger decisions. To do that I consider a model where a small and a large country compete in a third (world) market. Each of the two countries has two firms (with potentially different costs) that supply the domestic market and...

Research in psychology suggests that some individuals are more sensitive to positive than to negative information while others are more sensitive to negative rather than positive information. I take these cognitive positive-negative asymmetries in information processing to a Bayesian...

This paper provides a theory of corporate social responsibility in imperfectly competitive markets. We consider a two-stage game where consumers have a preference from buying goods from firms that do CSR and where firms first decide simultaneously the amount per unit sold to give to social...

This article analyzes the implications of worker overestimation of productivity for firms in which incentives take the form of tournaments. Each worker overestimates his productivity but is aware of the bias in his opponent's self-assessment. The manager of the firm, on the other hand, correctly...

This paper studies the impact of firm cost and market size asymmetries on merger decisions. I consider a model where a small and a large country compete in a third (world) market. Each of the two countries has two firms (with potentially different costs) that supply the domestic market and...

The authors propose a task for eliciting attitudes towards risk that is close to real world risky decisions which typically involve gains and losses. The task consists of accepting or rejecting gambles that provide a gain with probability p and a loss with probability 1 p. The authors employ...

In a controlled laboratory experiment we use one sample of college students and one of mature executives to investigate how positive skew influences risky choices. In reduced-form regressions we find that both students and executives make riskier choices when lotteries display positive skew. We...