["The Japanese Economic Review, EarlyView. ", "\nThis paper investigates a symmetric two‐player game with canyon‐shaped payoffs, in which a player’s payoff function is smooth and concave above and below the diagonal but not differentiable on the diagonal. We demonstrate that there exists a first‐mover advantage when the two players move sequentially and a player’s preference to the opponent’s choice is monotonic and identical between a higher‐strategy player and a lower‐strategy player. We also show that our symmetric two‐player game may yield the first‐mover advantage outcome in an endogenous timing game with observable delay.\n"]