This paper presents a novel approach to analyze human decision-making that involves comparing the behavior of professional chess players relative to a computational benchmark of cognitively bounded rationality. This benchmark is constructed using algorithms of modern chess engines and allows...

New sellers who enter online marketplaces have to build up an online reputation in order to be successful. I examine how sellers use "free'' (offering products at a zero price) as a dynamic pricing strategy to encourage consumers to experience their products, thereby increasing the number of...

We seek to answer whether handicaps can restore optimal effort provision by agents in heterogeneous contests. To this end, we study data from swimming relay competitions where swimmers with heterogeneous abilities inherit leads or lags from their previous team members. Inheriting a lead or lag...

We study a model of competitive foremarkets and partly monopolized aftermarkets. We show that high aftermarket power prompts firms to engage in inefficiently aggressive below-cost pricing in the foremarket. This inefficiency is driven by the presence of consumers with valuations below marginal...

This paper presents novel evidence for the prevalence of deviations from rational behavior in human decision making – and for the corresponding causes and consequences. The analysis is based on move-by-move data from chess tournaments and an identification strategy that compares behavior of...

An important question in markets with asymmetric information is why in practice fewer sellers voluntarily disclose their private information than theory would predict. To better understand this discrepancy, I use data from an online self-publishing platform to examine the empirical relationship...

This paper presents an empirical investigation of the relation between decision speed and decision quality for a real-world setting of cognitively-demanding decisions in which the timing of decisions is endogenous: professional chess. Move-by-move data provide exceptionally detailed and precise...

This paper analyzes a two-player all-pay auction with incomplete information. More precisely, one bidder is uncertain about the size of the initial advantage of his rival modeled as a head start in the auction. I derive the unique Bayesian Nash equilibrium outcome for a large class of cumulative...