Managing Self-Confidence: Theory and Experimental Evidence

• 成果类型: Article
• 署名作者: Mobius, Markus M.; Niederle, Muriel; Niehaus, Paul; Rosenblat, Tanya S.
• 署名单位: Microsoft; University of Michigan System; University of Michigan; National Bureau of Economic Research; Stanford University; University of California System; University of California San Diego
• 刊物名称: MANAGEMENT SCIENCE
• ISSN/ISSBN: 0025-1909
• DOI: 10.1287/mnsc.2021.4294
• 发表日期: 2022
• 页码: 7793-7817
• 关键词: asymmetric belief updating; conservatism; Information aversion; overconfidence

摘要

We use a series of experiments to understand whether and how people's beliefs about their own abilities are biased relative to the Bayesian benchmark and how these beliefs then affect behavior. We find that subjects systematically and substantially overweight positive feedback relative to negative (asymmetry) and also update too little overall (conservatism). These biases are substantially less pronounced in an ego-free control experiment. Updating does retain enough of the structure of Bayes' rule to let us model it coherently in an optimizing framework, in which, interestingly, asymmetry and conservatism emerge as complementary biases. We also find that exogenous changes in beliefs affect subjects' decisions to enter into a competition and do so similarly for more and less biased subjects, suggesting that people cannot undo their biases when the time comes to decide.