The Quality of Expertise

• 成果类型: Article
• 署名作者: Van Wesep, Edward D.
• 署名单位: University of Colorado System; University of Colorado Boulder
• 刊物名称: MANAGEMENT SCIENCE
• ISSN/ISSBN: 0025-1909
• DOI: 10.1287/mnsc.2015.2271
• 发表日期: 2016
• 页码: 2937-2951
• 关键词: expertise; learning; prediction; overconfidence

摘要

Policy makers and managers often turn to experts when in need of information, but we should expect experts to be systematically biased. This is because the decision to research a question implies a belief that research will be fruitful. If priors about the impact of one's work are correct on average, then those who choose to research a question are optimistic about the quality of their work. The bias varies predictably with attributes of the question being studied. This fact has implications for a variety of mechanism design applications and yields predictions in accordance with a large literature in psychology.