Self-efficacy beliefs and imitation: A two-armed bandit experiment

Stefania Innocenti () and Robin Cowan

European Economic Review, 2019, vol. 113, issue C, 156-172

Abstract: It is generally believed that individuals imitate others to gain status, minimise regret or simply ameliorate their performance. Psychology provides a complementary explanation: imitation becomes appealing when agents have little faith in their abilities. We investigate the extent to which self-efficacy beliefs affect agents’ propensities to imitate others. We propose an experimental task, which is a modified version of the two-armed bandit. We measure participants’ self-assessed self-efficacy, then study individual learning. Subsequently, we measure how individuals use the information they gather observing a randomly selected group leader. We find that, in stable environments, a 1% increase in individual self-efficacy reduces the propensity to imitate others by 3%.

Keywords: Learning; Imitation; Laboratory experiment; Self-efficacy beliefs (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2019
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0014292119300054
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

Related works:
Working Paper: Self-efficacy beliefs and imitation: A two-armed bandit experiment (2019)
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:eecrev:v:113:y:2019:i:c:p:156-172

DOI: 10.1016/j.euroecorev.2018.12.009

Access Statistics for this article

European Economic Review is currently edited by T.S. Eicher, A. Imrohoroglu, E. Leeper, J. Oechssler and M. Pesendorfer

More articles in European Economic Review from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().