Limited Strategic Thinking and the Cursed Match
实验研究个体在垂直差异化匹配市场中是否预见到被接受为伴侣传递坏消息的诅咒，发现被试因有限战略思维未对外生保留价值变化做出反应。
In vertically differentiated matching markets with private information, agents face an acceptance curse: being accepted as a partner conveys bad news. We experimentally investigate whether individuals anticipate the acceptance curse in such an environment. We test the effect of an exogenous change in reservation values, making some types more selective and inducing significant changes in the posterior distribution of match qualities. Consistent with limited strategic sophistication, subjects don’t respond to this manipulation. Through additional investigation and structural estimations, we suggest a mechanism explaining the lack of subjects’ response: out-of-equilibrium beliefs are quantitatively more important than limited conditional thinking.