In strategic settings a player may be able to influence the behavior of an opponent by revealing information about their own characteristics. They may for example aim to exploit stereotypes held by others. We provide an experimental test of this. A substantial fraction of players in a trust game exhibit a positive willingness to pay to reveal a photograph of themselves to their randomly-assigned partner. This suggests that they perceive that they can use their own characteristics to influence the behavior of others. The demand for such self-revelation depends negatively on price.

Mayshar et al. (2022) apply an instrumental variables identification strategy to data from nearly 1,000 societies included in the Ethnographic Atlas to claim that cultivation of cereals (appropriable by elites), rather than increased land productivity following the adoption of agriculture, led to the development of the state. We show two things. (1) Evidence for the appropriability theory holds when moving from a tribe-chiefdom to a state and not more broadly. (2) Conclusions are driven by a handful of outliers with statistical significance at the 10% level lost with winsorization at 2.1% (or trimming at 1.2%) of locations by cereal advantage.