Underconfidence and the low experimentation trap

Nicholas Tyack, Aminou Arouna, Urbain Dembele and Timo Goeschl

No 404524, 2026 Annual Meeting, July 26 - 28, 2026, Kansas City, Missouri from Agricultural and Applied Economics Association

Abstract: We study how confidence bias affects investment in learning via experimentation, a mechanism critical for technology adoption under uncertainty. We hypothesize that bias direction and strength predict how willingness to experiment diverges from unbiased agents. We measure revealed and stated demand for experimenting with drought-resistant crop varieties of 1,957 farmers in West Africa, a climate change hotspot. Consistent with our hypothesis, confidence bias strongly predicts willingness to experiment. The effect, however, is driven exclusively by underconfident agents, among whom females are overrepresented. In deteriorating environments, this behavioral friction undercuts effective technology diffusion and risks trapping individuals in maladapted production environments.

Keywords: Research; Methods/; Statistical; Methods (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 67
Date: 2026
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://ageconsearch.umn.edu/record/404524/files/1 ... Underconf_Experi.pdf (application/pdf)

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:ags:aaea26:404524

DOI: 10.22004/ag.econ.404524

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in 2026 Annual Meeting, July 26 - 28, 2026, Kansas City, Missouri from Agricultural and Applied Economics Association Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by AgEcon Search ().