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http://hdl.handle.net/10419/56322
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| Title: | | Confidence interval estimation tasks and the economics of overconfidence  |
| Authors: | | Cesarini, David Sandewall, Örjan Johannesson, Magnus |
| Issue Date: | | 2003 |
| Series/Report no.: | | SSE/EFI Working Paper Series in Economics and Finance 535 |
| Abstract: | | Experiments in psychology, where subjects estimate confidence intervals to a series of factual questions, have shown that individuals report far too narrow intervals. This has been interpreted as evidence of overconfidence in the preciseness of knowledge, a potentially serious violation of the rationality assumption in economics. Following these results a growing literature in economics has incorporated overconfidence in models of, for instance, financial markets. In this paper we investigate the robustness of results from confidence interval estimation tasks with respect to a number of manipulations: frequency assessments, peer frequency assessments, iteration, and monetary incentives. Our results suggest that a large share of the overconfidence in interval estimation tasks is an artifact of the response format. Using frequencies and monetary incentives reduces the measured overconfidence in the confidence interval method by about 65%. The results are consistent with the notion that subjects have a deep aversion to setting broad confidence intervals, a reluctance that we attribute to a socially rational trade-off between informativeness and accuracy. |
| Subjects: | | overconfidence uncertainty monetary incentives experiments |
| JEL: | | C91 D80 Z13 |
| Document Type: | | Working Paper |
| Appears in Collections: | | SSE/EFI Working Paper Series in Economics and Finance, EFI - The Economic Research Institute, Stockholm School of Economics
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