Hj Holm
Vice Dean Research Education, Professor
Strategic Decisions : Behavioral Differences Between CEOs and Others
Author
Summary, in English
Differences in strategic decision making between CEOs and other people are interesting since CEOs make important economic decisions and impact values and norms in society. Our study combines a large stratified random sample of 199 CEOs of medium-size firms with a carefully selected control group of 200 comparable people. All subjects participated in three different incentivized strategic games — Prisoner’s Dilemma, Chicken, Battle-of-the-Sexes. We report substantial and robust differences in both behavior and beliefs between the CEOs and the control group. The CEOs are closer to the socially optimal strategy profile in all games. Hence, as a group the CEOs out-competes the control-group members and thereby receives higher average earnings, but not by being smarter (in the narrow “rationalistic” sense) or more selfish, but by being more cooperative and less aggressive.
Department/s
- Department of Economics
Publishing year
2016-12-13
Language
English
Publication/Series
Working Papers
Volume
2016
Issue
35
Links
Document type
Working paper
Publisher
Department of Economics, Lund University
Topic
- Business Administration
Keywords
- strategies
- efficiency
- Nash equilibrium
- incentivized behavior
- CEOs
- C70
- C93
- D22
- L26
Status
Published