OVERCONFIDENCE, OMENS AND EMOTIONS: RESULTS FROM A FIELD EXPERIMENT

Maria De Paola (), Francesca Gioia () and Vincenzo Scoppa ()

No 201303, Working Papers from Università della Calabria, Dipartimento di Economia, Statistica e Finanza "Giovanni Anania" - DESF

Abstract: We analyze how overconfidence is affected by superstitious beliefs and emotions induced by positive and negative stimuli in a field experiment involving about 700 Italian students who were randomly assigned to numbered seats in their written examination sessions. According to widespread superstitions, some numbers are considered lucky, while others are considered unlucky. At the end of the examination, we asked students the grade they expected to get. We find that students tend to be systematically overconfident and that their overconfidence is positively affected by being assigned to a lucky number. Interestingly, males and females react differently: on the one hand, females tend to expect lower grades when assigned to unlucky numbers, while they are not affected by being assigned to lucky numbers. On the other hand, males are not affected by being assigned to unlucky numbers but expect higher grades when assigned to lucky numbers.

Keywords: Expectations; Grade; Overconfidence; Emotions; Superstition (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D01 D03 D83 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 21 pages
Date: 2013-02
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-cbe, nep-exp, nep-hrm and nep-neu
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (2)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.ecostat.unical.it/RePEc/WorkingPapers/WP03_2013.pdf First version, 2013-02 (application/pdf)

Related works:
Working Paper: Overconfidence, Omens And Emotions: Results From A Field Experiment (2013)
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:clb:wpaper:201303

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Working Papers from Università della Calabria, Dipartimento di Economia, Statistica e Finanza "Giovanni Anania" - DESF Università della Calabria, Dipartimento di Economia, Statistica e Finanza "Giovanni Anania", Ponte Pietro Bucci, Cubo 0/C, I-87036 Arcavacata di Rende, CS, Italy. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Giovanni Dodero ().