IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/ecm/feam04/708.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

Overconfidence in Economic Contests

Author

Listed:
  • Munetomo Ando

Abstract

This paper studies an economic contest with two participants, who have overconfidence in their own relative abilities. We examine two different sources of overconfidence, overestimation of one's own ability and underestimation of the rival's ability, and compare the behavioral consequences of each situation with the correctly estimated case. The main result is that the former always induces the participants' aggressive behavior, while the latter does not.

Suggested Citation

  • Munetomo Ando, 2004. "Overconfidence in Economic Contests," Econometric Society 2004 Far Eastern Meetings 708, Econometric Society.
  • Handle: RePEc:ecm:feam04:708
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://repec.org/esFEAM04/up.23374.1080724530.pdf
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    References listed on IDEAS

    as
    1. Hideshi Itoh, 2004. "Moral Hazard and Other‐Regarding Preferences," The Japanese Economic Review, Japanese Economic Association, vol. 55(1), pages 18-45, March.
    2. Benny Moldovanu & Aner Sela, 2008. "The Optimal Allocation of Prizes in Contests," Springer Books, in: Roger D. Congleton & Arye L. Hillman & Kai A. Konrad (ed.), 40 Years of Research on Rent Seeking 1, pages 615-631, Springer.
    3. Nirvikar Singh & Donald Wittman, 2001. "Contests where there is variation in the marginal productivity of effort," Economic Theory, Springer;Society for the Advancement of Economic Theory (SAET), vol. 18(3), pages 711-744.
    4. Juan Dubra, 2004. "Optimism and Overconfidence in Search," Review of Economic Dynamics, Elsevier for the Society for Economic Dynamics, vol. 7(1), pages 198-218, January.
    5. Ando, Munetomo, 2004. "Division of a contest with identical prizes," Journal of the Japanese and International Economies, Elsevier, vol. 18(2), pages 282-297, June.
    6. Colin F. Camerer, 1997. "Progress in Behavioral Game Theory," Journal of Economic Perspectives, American Economic Association, vol. 11(4), pages 167-188, Fall.
    7. Robert Dorsey & Laura Razzolini, 2003. "Explaining Overbidding in First Price Auctions Using Controlled Lotteries," Experimental Economics, Springer;Economic Science Association, vol. 6(2), pages 123-140, October.
    8. Amann, Erwin & Leininger, Wolfgang, 1996. "Asymmetric All-Pay Auctions with Incomplete Information: The Two-Player Case," Games and Economic Behavior, Elsevier, vol. 14(1), pages 1-18, May.
    9. Krishna, Vijay & Morgan, John, 1997. "An Analysis of the War of Attrition and the All-Pay Auction," Journal of Economic Theory, Elsevier, vol. 72(2), pages 343-362, February.
    10. Noussair, Charles & Silver, Jonathon, 2006. "Behavior in all-pay auctions with incomplete information," Games and Economic Behavior, Elsevier, vol. 55(1), pages 189-206, April.
    11. Dan Lovallo & Colin Camerer, 1999. "Overconfidence and Excess Entry: An Experimental Approach," American Economic Review, American Economic Association, vol. 89(1), pages 306-318, March.
    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. 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. Ludwig, Sandra & Wichardt, Philipp C. & Wickhorst, Hanke, 2011. "Overconfidence can improve an agent's relative and absolute performance in contests," Economics Letters, Elsevier, vol. 110(3), pages 193-196, March.

    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. Minoru Kitahara & Ryo Ogawa, 2010. "All-Pay Auctions with Handicaps," ISER Discussion Paper 0781, Institute of Social and Economic Research, Osaka University, revised Jun 2010.
    2. David Pérez-Castrillo & David Wettstein, 2012. "Innovation Contests," Working Papers 654, Barcelona School of Economics.
    3. Andreoni, James & Brownback, Andy, 2017. "All pay auctions and group size: Grading on a curve and other applications," Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization, Elsevier, vol. 137(C), pages 361-373.
    4. David Perez Castrillo & David Wettstein, 2014. "Discrimination in a new model of contests with two-sided asymmetric information," Working Papers 1407, Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, Department of Economics.
    5. Ando, Munetomo, 2004. "Division of a contest with identical prizes," Journal of the Japanese and International Economies, Elsevier, vol. 18(2), pages 282-297, June.
    6. Brownback, Andy, 2018. "A classroom experiment on effort allocation under relative grading," Economics of Education Review, Elsevier, vol. 62(C), pages 113-128.
    7. Emmanuel Dechenaux & Dan Kovenock & Roman Sheremeta, 2015. "A survey of experimental research on contests, all-pay auctions and tournaments," Experimental Economics, Springer;Economic Science Association, vol. 18(4), pages 609-669, December.
    8. Segev, Ella & Sela, Aner, 2014. "Multi-stage sequential all-pay auctions," European Economic Review, Elsevier, vol. 70(C), pages 371-382.
    9. Segev, Ella & Sela, Aner, 2014. "Sequential all-pay auctions with noisy outputs," Journal of Mathematical Economics, Elsevier, vol. 50(C), pages 251-261.
    10. Moldovanu, Benny & Sela, Aner, 2006. "Contest architecture," Journal of Economic Theory, Elsevier, vol. 126(1), pages 70-96, January.
    11. Cohen, Chen & Lagziel, David & Levi, Ofer & Sela, Aner, 2023. "The role of the second prize in all-pay auctions with two heterogeneous prizes," Journal of Mathematical Economics, Elsevier, vol. 105(C).
    12. Aner Sela & Yizhaq Minchuk, 2024. "Carrots and sticks: collaboration of taxation and subsidies in contests," Working Papers 2407, Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, Department of Economics.
    13. Joao Montez & Nicolas Schutz, 2021. "All-Pay Oligopolies: Price Competition with Unobservable Inventory Choices [Extremal Equilibria of Oligopolistic Supergames]," The Review of Economic Studies, Review of Economic Studies Ltd, vol. 88(5), pages 2407-2438.
    14. Aner Sela, 2016. "Two Stage Contests With Effort-Dependent Rewards," Working Papers 1612, Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, Department of Economics.
    15. Yizhaq Minchuk & Aner Sela, 2020. "Contests with insurance," Review of Economic Design, Springer;Society for Economic Design, vol. 24(1), pages 1-22, June.
    16. Kai Konrad, 2012. "Information alliances in contests with budget limits," Public Choice, Springer, vol. 151(3), pages 679-693, June.
    17. Lea-Rachel Kosnik, 2008. "Refusing to budge: a confirmatory bias in decision making?," Mind & Society: Cognitive Studies in Economics and Social Sciences, Springer;Fondazione Rosselli, vol. 7(2), pages 193-214, November.
    18. James Andreoni & Andy Brownback, 2014. "Grading on a Curve, and other Effects of Group Size on All-Pay Auctions," NBER Working Papers 20184, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.
    19. Aner Sela, 2018. "Reverse Contests," Working Papers 1804, Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, Department of Economics.
    20. Sela, Aner, 2023. "Two-stage elimination games," Journal of Mathematical Economics, Elsevier, vol. 109(C).

    More about this item

    Keywords

    Overconfidence; economic contest; relative ability; all-pay auction;
    All these keywords.

    JEL classification:

    • D - Microeconomics
    • D82 - Microeconomics - - Information, Knowledge, and Uncertainty - - - Asymmetric and Private Information; Mechanism Design

    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:ecm:feam04:708. 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: Christopher F. Baum (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/essssea.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.