Looking at the bright side: The motivational value of confidence

Si Chen and Hannah Schildberg-Hörisch
Authors registered in the RePEc Author Service: Hannah Schildberg-Hoerisch ()

European Economic Review, 2019, vol. 120, issue C

Abstract: The motivational value of confidence postulates that individual effort provision is increasing in beliefs on one’s own ability. This relation is supposed to also hold for overconfident individuals who have exaggerated ability beliefs. We present the first empirical evidence on the existence of a motivational value of absolute confidence that many microeconomic models with overconfident agents build on. Moreover, we document that negative debiasing information on individual ability diminishes effort provision – a result that is of obvious relevance for many contexts such as labor relations or learning at school. We also offer a strategy for identifying significant absolute overconfidence at the individual level.

Keywords: Confidence; Absolute overconfidence; Effort provision; Laboratory experiment (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C91 D91 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2019
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (27)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0014292119301540
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

Related works:
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:120:y:2019:i:c:s0014292119301540

DOI: 10.1016/j.euroecorev.2019.103302

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 ().