In a seminal paper Bagwell ((1995). Games Econom. Behav. 8, 271-280) claims
that the first mover advantage, i.e., the strategic benefit of committing
oneself to an action before others can, vanishes completely if this action
is only imperfectly observed by second movers. In our paper we report on an
experimental test of this prediction We implement four versions of a game
similar to an example given by Bagwell, each time varying the quality of th
e signal which informs the second mover. For experienced players we do not
find empirical support for Bagwell's result. Journal of Economic Literature
Classification Numbers: C72, C92. (C) 2000 Academic Press.