Effects of Social Information on Risk Taking and Performance: Understanding Others’ Decisions vs. Comparing Oneself with Others in Short-Term Performance

The authors are grateful to the special issue editors Sheen Levine, Oliver Schilke, Olenka Kacperczyk, and Lynne Zucker and to three anonymous reviewers for their thoughtful comments and advice. Their feedback significantly improved the paper. The editorial team provided excellent guidance throughout the review process. Special thanks go to colleagues who enabled the authors to run experiments at their home universities—among them are Kay Blaufuss, Behnud Mir Djawadi, René Fahr, Marina Fiedler, Holger Gerhardt, Thorsten Knauer, Martin Kocher, Michael Milde, Claudia Möllers, Michael Roos, Florian Sachs, Anja Schwering, Lisa Spantig, Kim Strunk, Dirk van Straaten, Sonia Wolf, Joachim Weimann, and Harald Wypior—and to the student assistants for their support in running the experiments. Andrew Fletcher and Graham Sutherland provided careful language editing. Andrew Fletcher produced the recording of the English instructions. The authors’ (identified by their initials) contributions are as follows: MH, SP, and the late Reinhard Selten designed the study while working on the research project “Rationality in the Light of Experimental Economics” (which Reinhard Selten directed from 2006 to 2014), using a finance context they developed jointly with AP. SP computed the optimal solution of the decision problem underlying the experiments and programmed the experimental software. MH, AO, and SP conducted the experiments. MH and SP conducted the statistical analysis and interpreted the data. MH and SP wrote the manuscript with significant contributions from AO and AP.