Strategic thinking in contests

Experimental Economics - Tập 25 - Trang 942-973 - 2021
David Bruner1, Caleb Cox2, David M. McEvoy1, Brock Stoddard1
1Department of Economics, Appalachian State University, Boone, USA
2Department of Economics, Virginia Commonwealth University, Richmond, USA

Tóm tắt

We examine motives for ‘overbidding’ in contests between individuals using a “two-headed” approach to decision-making. In “two-headed” contests, subject pairs send suggested bids and messages to a partner. Content analysis of the messages provides insight into an individual’s bidding motives. In addition, we elicit measures of preferences, beliefs, and impulsiveness. We find that beliefs about others’ bids and messages that emphasize winning (i.e., utility of winning) are the most robust predictors of ‘overbidding’. Our results suggest that analyzing communication provides a rich window into an individual’s thought process when making decisions, and can complement insights from elicited values from common decision tasks (Replication materials, including data, do files, and software, are available at https://sites.google.com/view/david-bruner/research ).

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