Evidence from social psychology suggests that agents process information about their own ability in a biased manner. This evidence has motivated exciting research in behavioral economics, but also garnered critics who point out that it is potentially consistent with standard Bayesian updating....

We assess the predictive power of two measures of competitiveness for education and labor market outcomes using a large, representative survey panel. The first is incentivized and is an online adaptation of the laboratory-based Niederle-Vesterlund measure. The second is an unincentivized survey...

Competitive high ranking positions are largely occupied by men, and women remain scarce in engineering and sciences. Explanations for these occupational differences focus on discrimination and preferences for work hours and field of study. We examine if absent these factors gender differences in...

We propose a new hypothesis, the Power of Certainty, to help explain agents' difficulties in making choices when there are multiple possible payoff-relevant states. In the probabilistic ‘Acquiring-a-Company' problem an agent submits a price to a firm before knowing whether the firm is of low...

We study an experimental market in which the structure of the information flows is endogenized. When making an offer, traders choose not only the price at which they are prepared to trade, but also the subset of traders they want to inform about the offer. This design allows for two extreme...

Laboratory studies have documented that women often respond less favorably to competition than men. Conditional on performance, men are often more eager to compete, and the performance of men tends to respond more positively to an increase in competition. This means that few women enter and win...