Please use this identifier to cite or link to this item: https://hdl.handle.net/10419/120836 
Year of Publication: 
2015
Series/Report no.: 
Staff Report No. 711
Publisher: 
Federal Reserve Bank of New York, New York, NY
Abstract: 
We provide a preference-based rationale for endogenous overconfidence. Horizon-dependent risk aversion, combined with a possibility to forget, can generate overconfidence and excessive risk taking in equilibrium. An "anxiety prone" agent, who is more risk-averse to imminent than to distant risks, has an incentive to distort her future self's beliefs toward underestimating risk. Such self-deception can be achieved even if the future self is aware of the attempted distortion. We relate our results to the literature on empirically observed overconfidence and excessive risk taking in several domains of financial and other types of decision making.
Subjects: 
overconfidence
dynamic consistency
biases
deception
risk taking
JEL: 
A12
D81
D83
D84
Document Type: 
Working Paper

Files in This Item:
File
Size
567.44 kB





Items in EconStor are protected by copyright, with all rights reserved, unless otherwise indicated.