The Economics of Motivated Beliefs

Roland Benabou

Revue d'économie politique, 2015, vol. 125, issue 5, 665-685

Abstract: I present the key ideas and results from recent work incorporating ?motivated? belief distortions into Economics, both at the individual level (overconfidence, wishful thinking, willful blindness) and at the social one (groupthink, team morale, market exuberance and crises). To do so I develop a flexible model that unifies much of this line of research, then relate its main assumptions and testable predictions to the relevant experimental and observational evidence.

Keywords: beliefs; wishful thinking; overconfidence; hubris; groupthink; group morale; organizational culture; market exuberance; speculative bubbles; financial crisis; cognitive biases; cognitive dissonance; motivated cognition; anticipatory utility; memory; non-bayesian updating; information aversion; willful ignorance; psychology (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2015
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (27)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.cairn.info/load_pdf.php?ID_ARTICLE=REDP_255_0665 (application/pdf)
http://www.cairn.info/revue-d-economie-politique-2015-5-page-665.htm (text/html)
free

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:cai:repdal:redp_255_0665

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in Revue d'économie politique from Dalloz
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Jean-Baptiste de Vathaire ().