Fear of failure can dominate the choices of individuals. We model its role in the decision to become an entrepreneur and subsequent investments made in pursuit of success using the framework of loss aversion. We show that when an individual's threshold for success is sufficiently high, fear of...

Is it better to be a big fish in a small pond or a small fish in a big pond? To find out, we study self-selection into contests among a large population of heterogeneous agents. Our simple and highly tractable model generates many testable and sometimes surprising predictions. For example: 1)...

Levitt and List (2007) conjecture that selection pressures among business people will reduce or eliminate pro-social choices. While recent work comparing students with various adult populations often fails to find that adults are less pro-social, this evidence is not necessarily at odds with the...

This paper addresses the following two questions: 1) Is the threat of punitive tariffs on Japanese auto manufacturers (who purchase auto parts in Japan) sufficient to implement the market share target in auto parts, and 2)What policy or set of policies should the U.S. adopt to achieve the target...

In private values settings, the Vickrey-Clarke-Groves (VCG) mechanism leads to efficient auction outcomes, while the theoretical properties of the Simultaneous Ascending (SA) auction are not well understook. This leads us to compare the properties of an SA and a VCG auction in an experimental...

We show that the value of commitment in many standard games is fragile. Specifically, when the second mover faces a small cost to observe the first mover's action, equilibrium payoffs are identical to the case where observation is in finitely costly or the first mover's actions are completely...

This paper considers identification and estimation of a general model for online price competition. We show that when the number of competing firms is unknown, the underlying parameters of the model can still be identified and estimated employing recently developed results on measurement errors....

In an earlier paper (Blinder and Morgan, 2005), we created an experimental apparatus in which Princeton University students acted as ersatz central bankers, making monetary policy decisions both as individuals and in groups. In this study, we manipulate the size and leadership structure of...

We extend Krugman's (1979) model of trade to multiple sectors or industries and show that, sector-by-sector, a bit of trade is worse than no trade at all. The reason is that the gains from the initiation of trade are second-order, while the welfare loss from the associated drop in varieties is...

We show that too much meritocracy, modeled as accuracy of performance ranking in contests, can be a bad thing: in contests with homogeneous agents, it reduces output and is Pareto inefficient. In contests with sufficiently heterogeneous agents, discouragement and complacency effects further...