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Berger and Pope (2011) show that being slightly behind increases the likelihood of winning in professional (National Basketball Association; NBA) and collegiate (National Collegiate Athletic Association; NCAA) basketball. We extend their analysis to large samples of Australian football, American football, and rugby matches, but find no evidence of such an effect for these three sports. When we revisit the phenomenon for basketball, we only find supportive evidence for NBA matches from the period analyzed in Berger and Pope (2011). There is no significant effect for NBA matches from outside this sample period, for NCAA matches, or for matches from the Women’s National Basketball Association. High-powered meta-analyses across the different sports and competitions do not reject the null hypothesis of no effect of being slightly behind on winning. The confidence intervals suggest that the true effect, if existent at all, is likely relatively small.

Is punishment of free riders driven by descriptive social norms of cooperation and punishment? We conduct experiments in which participants interact in a one-shot social dilemma with punishment. We study how punishment of free riders is influenced by behavior among members of a payoff-irrelevant reference group. Participants can condition punishment on either the level of cooperation or the level of punishment in the reference group, respectively reflecting descriptive norms of cooperation and punishment. We observe considerable heterogeneity in punishment behavior. Among punishers, the most common strategies are to increase punishment with higher levels of cooperation ("norm enforcement"), and to increase punishment with higher levels of punishment in the reference group ("conformist punishment"). By means of a simple dynamic model, we demonstrate that these conditional punishment strategies can substantially promote cooperation: conformist punishment helps cooperation to gain a foothold in a population, and norm enforcement helps to maintain cooperation at high levels. Our study illustrates how punishment is shaped by the social context, and highlights the potential of conditional punishment strategies to promote the emergence and maintenance of cooperation.

We demonstrate that a person's eye gaze and his/her competitiveness are closely intertwined in social decision making. In an exploratory examination of this relationship, Study 1 uses field data from a high-stakes TV game show to demonstrate that the frequency by which contestants gaze at their opponent's eyes predicts their defection in a variant on the prisoner's dilemma. Studies 2 and 3 use experiments to examine the underlying causality and demonstrate that the relationship between gazing and competitive behavior is bi-directional. In Study 2, fixation on the eyes, compared to the face, increases competitive behavior toward the target in an ultimatum game. In Study 3, we manipulate the framing of a negotiation (cooperative vs. competitive) and use an eye tracker to measure fixation number and time spent fixating on the counterpart's eyes. We find that a competitive negotiation elicits more gazing, which in turn leads to more competitive behavior.

This paper examines the effect of incentives on the performance of darts players. We analyze four data sets comprising a total of 123,402 darts matches of professional, amateur, and youth players. The game of darts offers an attractive natural research setting, because performance can be observed at the individual level and without the obscuring effects of risk considerations and the behavior of others. We find that amateur and youth players perform better under moderately higher incentives, but choke when the incentives are really high. Professional players similarly display better performance under higher incentives, but appear less susceptible of choking. These results speak to a growing literature on the limits of increasing incentives as a recipe for better performance.

This dissertation uses naturally occurring data from four different settings to study psychological factors that influence real-life decisions. Chapter 2 shows that contestants in a TV game show often deviate from the unique subgame perfect Nash equilibrium. These deviations can be explained by limited foresight, where a contestant only thinks ahead to the next stage of the game. Chapter 3 studies the effect of marginally trailing on performance in professional sports matches. Contrasting prior research, we find little evidence of such an effect in Australian football, American football, rugby and basketball. Chapter 4 shows that the demand for life-saving medications is higher when the price includes a discount compared to when the same final price materializes absent a discount. Chapter 5 investigates how within-match variation in incentives affects the performance of darts players. We find that amateur and youth players display a sizable performance decrease at decisive moments, whereas professional players appear less susceptible of such choking under pressure.