This paper shows that monitoring too much a partner in the initial phase of a relationship may not be optimal if the goal is to determine his loyalty to the match and if the cost of ending the relationship increases over time. The intuition is simple: by monitoring too much we learn less on how...

Sports provide a natural experiment on individual choices in games with high stakes. We study soccer with a game-theoretic model of a match, and then evaluate the ability of this model to explain actual behavior with data from 2885 matches among professional teams. In our model, the strategy of...