We examine high-stakes strategic choice using more than 40 years of data from the American TV game show The Price Is Right. In every episode, contestants play the Showcase Showdown, a sequential game of perfect information for which the optimal strategy can be found through backward induction....

This paper examines the effect of incentives on the performance of darts players. We analyze four data sets comprising a total of 123,402 darts matches of professional, amateur, and youth players. The game of darts offers an attractive natural research setting, because performance can be...

Berger and Pope (2011) show that being slightly behind increases the likelihood of winning in professional and collegiate basketball. We extend their analysis to large samples of Australian football, American football and rugby matches, but find little to no evidence of such an effect for these...

We examine gender differences in competitiveness, using a TV game show where the winner of an elimination competition plays a game of chance worth hundreds of thousands of euros. At several stages of the competition, contestants face a choice between continuing to compete and opting out in...

We examine cooperative behavior when large sums of money are at stake, using data from the television game show <i>Golden Balls</i>. At the end of each episode, contestants play a variant on the classic prisoner's dilemma for large and widely ranging stakes averaging over $20,000. Cooperation is...

A large literature in public economics seeks to answer whether government activity crowds out charitable donations, but the empirical evidence is mixed. To resolve this inconsistency, we consider that people base their donation decisions not only on government spending per se, but also on their...

Pharmaceutical pricing in the United States varies, and patients often do not know the out-of-pocket costs of their medications until arriving at the pharmacy to retrieve their prescriptions. In recent years, these pharmacy-counter interactions have seen the introduction of copay cards:...

A large literature in public economics seeks to answer whether government activity crowds out charitable donations. The empirical evidence is mixed, however, and prior estimates range from large crowding out effects to small crowding in effects. To resolve this inconsistency, we consider that...