In a seminal paper Bagwell (1995) claims that the first mover advantage, i.e. the strategic benefit of committing oneself to an action before others can do, vanishes completely if this action is only imperfectly observed by second movers. In our paper we report on an experimental test of this...

In this paper, we experimentally investigate the extended game with action commitment of Hamilton and Slutsky (1990). In their duopoly game, firms can choose their quantities in one of two periods before the market clears. If a firm commits to a quantity in period 1 it does not know whether the...

In a recent study Huck and Müller (1998) report that--in contrast to Bagwell's (1995) prediction--first movers in a simple experimental market do not lose their commitment power in the presence of noise. The present note shows that it is the quality of the signal and not the knowledge about the...