IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/lmu/muenec/11885.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

Overconfidence Can Improve an Agent's Relative and Absolute Performance in Contests

Author

Listed:
  • Ludwig, Sandra
  • Wichardt, Philipp C.
  • Wickhorst, Hanke

Abstract

This paper suggests a potential rationale for the recent empirical finding that overconfident agents tend to self-select into more competitive environments (e.g. Dohmen and Falk, forthcoming). In particular, it shows that moderate overconfidence in a contest can improve the agent's performance relative to an unbiased opponent and can even lead to an advantage for the overconfident agent in absolute terms.

Suggested Citation

  • Ludwig, Sandra & Wichardt, Philipp C. & Wickhorst, Hanke, 2010. "Overconfidence Can Improve an Agent's Relative and Absolute Performance in Contests," Discussion Papers in Economics 11885, University of Munich, Department of Economics.
  • Handle: RePEc:lmu:muenec:11885
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://epub.ub.uni-muenchen.de/11885/1/contestsletter_ELR1a.pdf
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    Other versions of this item:

    References listed on IDEAS

    as
    1. Luís Santos-Pinto, 2010. "Positive Self-Image In Tournaments," International Economic Review, Department of Economics, University of Pennsylvania and Osaka University Institute of Social and Economic Research Association, vol. 51(2), pages 475-496, May.
    2. Bjorn Bartling & Ernst Fehr & Michel Andre Marechal & Daniel Schunk, 2009. "Egalitarianism and Competitiveness," American Economic Review, American Economic Association, vol. 99(2), pages 93-98, May.
    3. Munetomo Ando, 2004. "Overconfidence in Economic Contests," Econometric Society 2004 Far Eastern Meetings 708, Econometric Society.
    Full references (including those not matched with items on IDEAS)

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Vanessa Mertins & Wolfgang Hoffeld, 2015. "Do Overconfident Workers Cooperate Less? The Relationship Between Overconfidence and Cooperation in Team Production," Managerial and Decision Economics, John Wiley & Sons, Ltd., vol. 36(4), pages 265-274, June.
    2. Zahra Murad & Martin Sefton & Chris Starmer, 2016. "How do risk attitudes affect measured confidence?," Journal of Risk and Uncertainty, Springer, vol. 52(1), pages 21-46, February.
    3. Robert Bordley & Marco Licalzi & Luisa Tibiletti, 2017. "A Target-Based Foundation for the “Hard-Easy Effect” Bias," Eurasian Studies in Business and Economics, in: Mehmet Huseyin Bilgin & Hakan Danis & Ender Demir & Ugur Can (ed.), Country Experiences in Economic Development, Management and Entrepreneurship, pages 659-671, Springer.
    4. Kim Gannon & Hanzhe Zhang, 2020. "An Evolutionary Justification for Overconfidence," Economics Bulletin, AccessEcon, vol. 40(3), pages 2494-2504.
    5. Ivana Vitanova, 2022. "CEO overconfidence and corporate tournaments," Managerial and Decision Economics, John Wiley & Sons, Ltd., vol. 43(5), pages 1423-1438, July.
    6. Marcus Roel & Manuel Staab, 2021. "The benefits of being misinformed," AMSE Working Papers 2108, Aix-Marseille School of Economics, France.
    7. Chen, Si & Schildberg-Hörisch, Hannah, 2018. "Looking at the bright side: The motivation value of overconfidence," DICE Discussion Papers 291, Heinrich Heine University Düsseldorf, Düsseldorf Institute for Competition Economics (DICE).
    8. Chen, Si & Schildberg-Hörisch, Hannah, 2019. "Looking at the bright side: The motivational value of confidence," European Economic Review, Elsevier, vol. 120(C).
    9. Cristina Nistor & Matthew Selove, 2020. "Pricing and Quality Provision in a Supply Relationship: A Model of Efficient Relational Contracts," Marketing Science, INFORMS, vol. 39(5), pages 939-955, September.
    10. Simon Dato & Andreas Grunewald & Daniel Müller, 2018. "Expectation-based loss aversion and rank-order tournaments," Economic Theory, Springer;Society for the Advancement of Economic Theory (SAET), vol. 66(4), pages 901-928, December.
    11. Yaoyao Wu, 2022. "Disappointment aversion in tournaments," Managerial and Decision Economics, John Wiley & Sons, Ltd., vol. 43(1), pages 26-30, January.

    Most related items

    These are the items that most often cite the same works as this one and are cited by the same works as this one.
    1. Vanessa Mertins & Wolfgang Hoffeld, 2015. "Do Overconfident Workers Cooperate Less? The Relationship Between Overconfidence and Cooperation in Team Production," Managerial and Decision Economics, John Wiley & Sons, Ltd., vol. 36(4), pages 265-274, June.
    2. Chen, Si & Schildberg-Hörisch, Hannah, 2019. "Looking at the bright side: The motivational value of confidence," European Economic Review, Elsevier, vol. 120(C).
    3. Sandra Ludwig & Julia Nafziger, 2011. "Beliefs about overconfidence," Theory and Decision, Springer, vol. 70(4), pages 475-500, April.
    4. Rémi Suchon & Marie Claire Villeval, 2017. "Does upward mobility harm trust?," Post-Print halshs-01659021, HAL.
    5. Herbst, Luisa & Konrad, Kai A. & Morath, Florian, 2017. "Balance of power and the propensity of conflict," Games and Economic Behavior, Elsevier, vol. 103(C), pages 168-184.
    6. Michalis Drouvelis & Julian C. Jamison, 2015. "Selecting public goods institutions: Who likes to punish and reward?," Southern Economic Journal, John Wiley & Sons, vol. 82(2), pages 501-534, October.
    7. Brice Corgnet & Roberto Hernán-González, 2019. "Revisiting the Trade-off Between Risk and Incentives: The Shocking Effect of Random Shocks?," Management Science, INFORMS, vol. 65(3), pages 1096-1114, March.
    8. Zhang, Peilu & Zhang, Yinjunjie & Palma, Marco, 2018. "Social Norms and Competitiveness: My Willingness to Compete Depends on Who I am (supposed to be)," MPRA Paper 89727, University Library of Munich, Germany.
    9. Luís Santos-Pinto, 2010. "Positive Self-Image In Tournaments," International Economic Review, Department of Economics, University of Pennsylvania and Osaka University Institute of Social and Economic Research Association, vol. 51(2), pages 475-496, May.
    10. Bazart, C. & Bonein, A., 2014. "Reciprocal relationships in tax compliance decisions," Journal of Economic Psychology, Elsevier, vol. 40(C), pages 83-102.
    11. Legge, Stefan & Schmid, Lukas, 2013. "Rankings, Random Successes, and Individual Performance," Economics Working Paper Series 1340, University of St. Gallen, School of Economics and Political Science.
    12. Volk, Stefan & Thöni, Christian & Ruigrok, Winfried, 2012. "Temporal stability and psychological foundations of cooperation preferences," Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization, Elsevier, vol. 81(2), pages 664-676.
    13. Brice Corgnet & Roberto Hernán-González & Eric Schniter, 2015. "Why real leisure really matters: incentive effects on real effort in the laboratory," Experimental Economics, Springer;Economic Science Association, vol. 18(2), pages 284-301, June.
    14. Gottardi, Piero & Meléndez-Jiménez, Miguel A. & Feri, Francesco, 2016. "Can there be a market for cheap-talk information? Some experimental evidence," CEPR Discussion Papers 11206, C.E.P.R. Discussion Papers.
    15. Balafoutas, Loukas & Kerschbamer, Rudolf & Sutter, Matthias, 2012. "Distributional preferences and competitive behavior," Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization, Elsevier, vol. 83(1), pages 125-135.
    16. Brandts, Jordi & Corgnet, Brice & Hernán-González, Roberto & Ortiz, José Mª & Solà, Carles, 2021. "Watching or not watching? Access to information and the incentive effects of firing threats," Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization, Elsevier, vol. 189(C), pages 672-685.
    17. Hoffmann, Timo, 2015. "Performance Pay, Sorting and Employers Choice:," VfS Annual Conference 2015 (Muenster): Economic Development - Theory and Policy 112968, Verein für Socialpolitik / German Economic Association.
    18. Kamas, Linda & Preston, Anne, 2012. "The importance of being confident; gender, career choice, and willingness to compete," Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization, Elsevier, vol. 83(1), pages 82-97.
    19. Suchon, Rémi & Villeval, Marie Claire, 2019. "The effects of status mobility and group identity on trust," Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization, Elsevier, vol. 163(C), pages 430-463.
    20. Cabrales, Antonio & Feri, Francesco & Gottardi, Piero & Meléndez-Jiménez, Miguel A., 2020. "Can there be a market for cheap-talk information? An experimental investigation," Games and Economic Behavior, Elsevier, vol. 121(C), pages 368-381.

    More about this item

    Keywords

    Overconfidence; Contests;

    JEL classification:

    • D21 - Microeconomics - - Production and Organizations - - - Firm Behavior: Theory
    • D44 - Microeconomics - - Market Structure, Pricing, and Design - - - Auctions
    • D82 - Microeconomics - - Information, Knowledge, and Uncertainty - - - Asymmetric and Private Information; Mechanism Design

    NEP fields

    This paper has been announced in the following NEP Reports:

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:lmu:muenec:11885. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    If CitEc recognized a bibliographic reference but did not link an item in RePEc to it, you can help with this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Tamilla Benkelberg (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/vfmunde.html .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.