The psychology literature provides ample evidence that people have difficulties taking the perspective of less-informed others. This paper presents a controlled experiment showing that this "curse of knowledge" can cause comparative overconfidence and overentry into competition. In a broader...

An individual is affected by the curse of knowledge when he fails to appreciate the viewpoint of a lesser-informed agent. In contrast to a rational person, the cursed individual behaves as if part of his private information were common knowledge. This systematic cognitive bias alters many...

We obtain rich measures of risk preferences of poor farmers in Vietnam, and estimate structural models that capture risk preferences over different probability levels and across different domains (gains and losses). The results break radically with the previous literature on risk preferences, in...

Risk aversion has generally been found to decrease in income or wealth. This may lead one to expect that poor countries will be more risk averse than rich countries. Recent comparative findings with students, however, suggest the opposite, giving rise to a riskincome paradox. We test this...

We examine situations in which a decision maker decides for another person as well as herself under conditions of payoff equality, and compare such decisions under responsibility to individual decisions. Estimating a structural model we find that responsibility leaves utility curvature...

We study the endowment effect and expectation-based reference points in the field leveraging the setup of the Socio-Economic Panel. Households receive a small item for taking part in the panel, and we randomly assign respondents either a towel or a notebook, which they can exchange at the end of...

Ambition as the desire for personal achievement is an important driver of behavior. Using laboratory experiments, we study the role of social influence on ambition in two distinct domains of achievement, namely performance goals and task complexity. In the first case, participants set themselves...

In this paper, we design an investment game which allows us to study the influence of selection when learning from others. Using the theoretical study of selection neglect in Jehiel (2018) as a guide, we test (i) for the presence of selection neglect in this investment context, and (ii) some...

We study how subjects in an experiment use different forms of public information about their opponents' past behavior. In the absence of public information, subjects appear to use rather detailed statistics summarizing their private experiences. If they have additional public information, they...

Recent behavioral models argue in favor of avoidance of instrumental information. We explore the role of information avoidance in a real-effort setting. Our experiment offers three main results. First, we confirm that preferences for avoidance of instrumental information exist, studying...