Do Overconfident Workers Cooperate Less? The Relationship between Overconfidence and Cooperation in Team Production

Vanessa Mertins and Wolfgang Hoffeld ()
Additional contact information
Wolfgang Hoffeld: Institute for Labour Law and Industrial Relations in the EU, University of Trier

No 201313, IAAEU Discussion Papers from Institute of Labour Law and Industrial Relations in the European Union (IAAEU)

Abstract: The tendency to underestimate others’ relative performance compared to one’s own is widespread among individuals in all work environments. We examine the relationship between, and the driving forces behind, individual overconfidence and voluntary cooperation in team production. Our experimental data suggest an indirect and gender-specific link: Overconfident men hold more optimistic beliefs about coworkers’ cooperativeness than men who lack confidence, and are accordingly significantly more cooperative, whereas overconfidence, beliefs, and cooperativeness are not correlated in women.

Keywords: team production; public good; experiment; real effort; cooperation; gender; overconfidence; belief (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C91 J16 J24 J33 M52 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2013-12
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-cbe, nep-exp, nep-hrm, nep-lab and nep-soc
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.iaaeu.de/images/DiscussionPaper/2013_13.pdf First version, 2013 (application/pdf)

Related works:
Journal Article: Do Overconfident Workers Cooperate Less? The Relationship Between Overconfidence and Cooperation in Team Production (2015)
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:iaa:dpaper:201313

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in IAAEU Discussion Papers from Institute of Labour Law and Industrial Relations in the European Union (IAAEU) Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Adrian Chadi ().