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We measure the willingness to compete of entrepreneurs and salaried workers in an experiment. Participants can choose between a piece rate and a tournament scheme in either private or public. We find that in the private condition, entrepreneurs are less competitive than salaried workers, but in the public condition, this ordering is reversed. Survey data suggest that perceived norms of appropriate behavior, along with beliefs about the instrumental value of competitiveness for professional success, can explain why entrepreneurs are more competitive when decisions are publicly observable. We also find that the latter condition improves the quality of experimental decisions. This paper was accepted by Yan Chen, behavioral economics and decision analysis. Funding: Financial support from the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (German Research Foundation) under Germany´s Excellence Strategy [Grant EXC 2126/1–390838866], the University of Cologne through the Hans Kelsen Prize and the Austrian Science Fund through the Special Research Area [Grant SFB F63] is gratefully acknowledged. Supplemental Material: The online appendix and data are available at https://doi.org/10.1287/mnsc.2023.4838. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We study in five diverse countries a laboratory social dilemma game in which incentives to steal from others lead to the socially inefficient diversion of resources from production unless the members of a given mini-society can abide by norms of non-theft or engage in low cost collective protection of their members’ wealth accumulations. We compare two treatments in which subjects have opportunities to exchange free-form messages to one without such opportunities, finding that most subjects allocate far less to theft and most groups achieve much greater efficiency in the presence of communication. Ease of identifying who has engaged in theft varies across the two communication treatments, but is of minor importance to the outcome. We find several coding-amenable elements of message content to be statistically significant predictors of group and individual outcomes. Contributing to the literature on culture, norms, and preferences, we find that the degree to which communication fosters cooperation varies among countries in a manner correlated with variation in survey based trust and with desistance from theft at the outset of our communication-free experiment treatment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]