Endogenous timing in a gaming tournament

This paper examines the theoretical background and actual behavior in a gam ing tournament with endogenous timing where a person has more incentive, st ructure, and time to form a strategy. The baseline treatment suggests that subgame perfection is a reasonable predictor of behavior - subjects made 17 0 of 208 theoretically predicted choices of best actions, with the majority of mistakes made in timing choices by the players who did not survive the cut to the second round. Four sensitivity treatments established that the d esign feature that lead to more predictable behavior was time to think - 74 5 of 960 correctly predicted decisions with more time versus 595 of 960 wit h less time. A random effects Probit model suggests that the key design fea ture that closed the gap between predicted and observed behavior was not ne cessarily the non-linear payoffs created by the tournament design, but rath er that the key was providing people with more time to think about their st rategy.