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Despite persistent organ shortages, many transplantable organs are discarded. Prior research links these losses to prolonged decisions, repeated offer rejections, and logistical delays. Organ allocation requires decision-makers to assess uncertain opportunities under time pressure, balancing additional information against the risk that another transplant center will claim the organ. Although allocation policies and acceptance behavior have been widely studied, less is known about how competition shapes information acquisition and commitment under uncertainty.
We study sequential decision-making in common-value allocation environments. A model identifies two opposing effects of competition: strategic urgency, which raises the cost of waiting, and informational caution, which may increase the evidentiary threshold for acceptance. We test whether behavior is consistent with these predictions in an online experiment in which participants repeatedly made sequential decisions using imperfect private information, either alone or against a simulated competitor.
Competition significantly increased immediate claiming after favorable initial evidence while reducing acceptance when later evidence became ambiguous. It also reduced information acquisition by increasing first-stage decisions and generated opportunity losses when participants delayed. However, we found no evidence that competition reduced the accuracy of acceptance decisions, although the study was not designed to establish equivalence or non-inferiority.
These findings show that competition does not simply make decision-makers more aggressive. Instead, it reshapes the value of waiting and the point at which evidence is judged sufficient for action. The results provide a foundation for designing competitive allocation mechanisms that may accelerate decisions, reduce delay-related organ discard, and improve resource utilization without compromising decision quality.

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