No evidence of biased updating in beliefs about absolute performance: A replication and generalization of Grossman and Owens (2012)

Quentin Cavalan, Vincent de Gardelle and Jean-Christophe Vergnaud

Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization, 2023, vol. 211, issue C, 530-548

Abstract: Many studies report that following feedback, individuals do not update their beliefs enough (a conservatism bias), and react more to good news than to bad news (an asymmetry bias), consistent with the idea of motivated beliefs. In the literature on conservatism and asymmetric updating, however, only one prior study focuses on judgments on absolute performance (Grossman & Owens, 2012), which finds that belief updating is well described by the Bayesian benchmark in that case. Here, we set out to test the replicability of these results and their robustness across several experimental manipulations, varying the uncertainty of participants’ priors, the tasks to perform, the format of beliefs and the elicitation rules used to incentivize these beliefs. We also introduce new measures of ego-relevance of these beliefs, and of the credibility of the feedback received by participants. Overall, we confirm across various experimental conditions that individuals exhibit no conservatism and asymmetry bias when they update their beliefs about their absolute performance. As in Grossman & Owens (2012), most observations are well-described by a Bayesian benchmark in our data. These results suggest a limit to the manifestation of motivated beliefs, and call for more research on the conditions under which biases in belief updating occur.

Keywords: Biased updating; Conservatism; Asymmetry; Feedback (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C91 D83 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2023
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0167268123001543
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

Related works:
Working Paper: No evidence of biased updating in beliefs about absolute performance: A replication and generalization of Grossman and Owens (2012) (2023)
Working Paper: No evidence of biased updating in beliefs about absolute performance: A replication and generalization of Grossman and Owens (2012) (2023)
Working Paper: No evidence of biased updating in beliefs about absolute performance: A replication and generalization of Grossman and Owens (2012) (2023)
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:jeborg:v:211:y:2023:i:c:p:530-548

DOI: 10.1016/j.jebo.2023.05.010

Access Statistics for this article

Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization is currently edited by Houser, D. and Puzzello, D.

More articles in Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().