IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/hal/cesptp/halshs-00272928.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

Monitoring optimistic agents

Author

Listed:
  • Nicolas Jacquemet

    (CES - Centre d'économie de la Sorbonne - UP1 - Université Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne - CNRS - Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, PSE - Paris School of Economics - UP1 - Université Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne - ENS-PSL - École normale supérieure - Paris - PSL - Université Paris Sciences et Lettres - EHESS - École des hautes études en sciences sociales - ENPC - École des Ponts ParisTech - CNRS - Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique - INRAE - Institut National de Recherche pour l’Agriculture, l’Alimentation et l’Environnement)

  • Jean-Louis Rullière

    (GATE - Groupe d'analyse et de théorie économique - UL2 - Université Lumière - Lyon 2 - ENS LSH - Ecole Normale Supérieure Lettres et Sciences Humaines - CNRS - Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique)

  • Isabelle Vialle

    (GATE - Groupe d'analyse et de théorie économique - UL2 - Université Lumière - Lyon 2 - ENS LSH - Ecole Normale Supérieure Lettres et Sciences Humaines - CNRS - Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique)

Abstract

Monitoring is typically included in economic models of crime thanks to a probability of detection, constant across individuals. We build on recent results in psychology to argue that comparative optimism deeply affects this standard relation. To this matter, we introduce an experiment involving proper incentives that allow a measurement of optimism bias. Our experiments support the relevance of so-called comparative optimism in decision under risk. In the context of illegal activities, our results provide a guide into costless devices to undermine fraud, through well-designed information campaigns.

Suggested Citation

  • Nicolas Jacquemet & Jean-Louis Rullière & Isabelle Vialle, 2008. "Monitoring optimistic agents," Université Paris1 Panthéon-Sorbonne (Post-Print and Working Papers) halshs-00272928, HAL.
    • Handle: RePEc:hal:cesptp:halshs-00272928
    DOI: 10.1016/j.joep.2007.10.002
    Note: View the original document on HAL open archive server: https://shs.hal.science/halshs-00272928
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://shs.hal.science/halshs-00272928/document
    Download Restriction: no
    File URL: https://libkey.io/10.1016/j.joep.2007.10.002?utm_source=ideas
    LibKey link: if access is restricted and if your library uses this service, LibKey will redirect you to where you can use your library subscription to access this item
    ---><---

    Other versions of this item:

    References listed on IDEAS

    as
    1. Jeremy Clark & Lana Friesen, 2009. "Overconfidence in Forecasts of Own Performance: An Experimental Study," Economic Journal, Royal Economic Society, vol. 119(534), pages 229-251, January.
    2. Charles A. Holt & Susan K. Laury, 2005. "Risk Aversion and Incentive Effects: New Data without Order Effects," American Economic Review, American Economic Association, vol. 95(3), pages 902-912, June.
    3. Gary S. Becker, 1974. "Crime and Punishment: An Economic Approach," NBER Chapters, in: Essays in the Economics of Crime and Punishment, pages 1-54, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.
    4. Das, Marcel & van Soest, Arthur, 1999. "A panel data model for subjective information on household income growth," Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization, Elsevier, vol. 40(4), pages 409-426, December.
    5. J. Dominitz & C. F. Manski, "undated". "Using expectations data to study subjective income expectations," Institute for Research on Poverty Discussion Papers 1050-94, University of Wisconsin Institute for Research on Poverty.
    6. Yaw Nyarko & Andrew Schotter, 2002. "An Experimental Study of Belief Learning Using Elicited Beliefs," Econometrica, Econometric Society, vol. 70(3), pages 971-1005, May.
    7. Tversky, Amos & Wakker, Peter, 1995. "Risk Attitudes and Decision Weights," Econometrica, Econometric Society, vol. 63(6), pages 1255-1280, November.
    8. Daniel Kahneman & Amos Tversky, 2013. "Prospect Theory: An Analysis of Decision Under Risk," World Scientific Book Chapters, in: Leonard C MacLean & William T Ziemba (ed.), HANDBOOK OF THE FUNDAMENTALS OF FINANCIAL DECISION MAKING Part I, chapter 6, pages 99-127, World Scientific Publishing Co. Pte. Ltd..
    9. Glenn W. Harrison & Eric Johnson & Melayne M. McInnes & E. Elisabet Rutström, 2005. "Risk Aversion and Incentive Effects: Comment," American Economic Review, American Economic Association, vol. 95(3), pages 897-901, June.
    10. Charles A. Holt & Susan K. Laury, 2002. "Risk Aversion and Incentive Effects," American Economic Review, American Economic Association, vol. 92(5), pages 1644-1655, December.
    11. Santos-Pinto, Luís & Park, Young-Joon, 2004. "Forecasts of relative performance in tournaments: evidence from the field," MPRA Paper 3144, University Library of Munich, Germany, revised 22 Mar 2007.
    12. Erik Hoelzl & Aldo Rustichini, 2005. "Overconfident: Do You Put Your Money On It?," Economic Journal, Royal Economic Society, vol. 115(503), pages 305-318, April.
    13. 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.
    14. Karni, Edi, 1999. "Elicitation of Subjective Probabilities When Preferences Are State-Dependent," International Economic Review, Department of Economics, University of Pennsylvania and Osaka University Institute of Social and Economic Research Association, vol. 40(2), pages 479-486, May.
    15. Antoni Bosch-Domènech & Joaquim Silvestre, 2006. "Risk aversion and embedding bias," Economics Working Papers 934, Department of Economics and Business, Universitat Pompeu Fabra.
    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. Filippin, Antonio & Crosetto, Paolo, 2014. "A Reconsideration of Gender Differences in Risk Attitudes," IZA Discussion Papers 8184, Institute of Labor Economics (IZA).
    2. repec:hal:wpaper:halshs-00746617 is not listed on IDEAS
    3. Bigoni, Maria & Le Coq, Chloé & Fridolfsson, Sven-Olof & Spagnolo, Giancarlo, 2008. "Risk Aversion, Prospect Theory, and Strategic Risk in Law Enforcement: Evidence From an Antitrust Experiment," SSE/EFI Working Paper Series in Economics and Finance 696, Stockholm School of Economics.
    4. Yannick Gabuthy & Nicolas Jacquemet, 2013. "Analyse économique du droit et méthode expérimentale," PSE-Ecole d'économie de Paris (Postprint) halshs-00746617, HAL.

    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. Kerri Brick & Martine Visser & Justine Burns, 2012. "Risk Aversion: Experimental Evidence from South African Fishing Communities," American Journal of Agricultural Economics, Agricultural and Applied Economics Association, vol. 94(1), pages 133-152.
    2. David Bruner, 2009. "Changing the probability versus changing the reward," Experimental Economics, Springer;Economic Science Association, vol. 12(4), pages 367-385, December.
    3. Bruhin, Adrian & Santos-Pinto, Luís & Staubli, David, 2018. "How do beliefs about skill affect risky decisions?," Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization, Elsevier, vol. 150(C), pages 350-371.
    4. Sandra Ludwig & Julia Nafziger, 2011. "Beliefs about overconfidence," Theory and Decision, Springer, vol. 70(4), pages 475-500, April.
    5. Enrico Diecidue & Peter Wakker & Marcel Zeelenberg, 2007. "Eliciting decision weights by adapting de Finetti’s betting-odds method to prospect theory," Journal of Risk and Uncertainty, Springer, vol. 34(3), pages 179-199, June.
    6. Michelson, Hope & Fairbairn, Anna & Ellison, Brenna & Maertens, Annemie & Manyong, Victor, 2021. "Misperceived quality: Fertilizer in Tanzania," Journal of Development Economics, Elsevier, vol. 148(C).
    7. Andersen, Steffen & Harrison, Glenn W. & Lau, Morten Igel & Rutström, Elisabet E., 2010. "Behavioral econometrics for psychologists," Journal of Economic Psychology, Elsevier, vol. 31(4), pages 553-576, August.
    8. Jean-Pierre Benoît & Juan Dubra & Giorgia Romagnoli, 2022. "Belief Elicitation When More than Money Matters: Controlling for "Control"," American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, American Economic Association, vol. 14(3), pages 837-888, August.
    9. 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.
    10. Galarza, Francisco, 2009. "Choices under Risk in Rural Peru," MPRA Paper 17708, University Library of Munich, Germany.
    11. Giuseppe Attanasi & Nikolaos Georgantzís & Valentina Rotondi & Daria Vigani, 2018. "Lottery- and survey-based risk attitudes linked through a multichoice elicitation task," Theory and Decision, Springer, vol. 84(3), pages 341-372, May.
    12. Bartczak, Anna & Chilton, Susan & Meyerhoff, Jürgen, 2015. "Wildfires in Poland: The impact of risk preferences and loss aversion on environmental choices," Ecological Economics, Elsevier, vol. 116(C), pages 300-309.
    13. Ulrich Schmidt & Christian Seidl, 2014. "Reconsidering the common ratio effect: the roles of compound independence, reduction, and coalescing," Theory and Decision, Springer, vol. 77(3), pages 323-339, October.
    14. David Burner & Michael McKee & Rudy Santore, 2008. "Hand in the Cookie Jar: An Experimental Investigation of Equity‐Based Compensation and Managerial Fraud," Southern Economic Journal, John Wiley & Sons, vol. 75(1), pages 261-278, July.
    15. Meraner, Manuela & Musshoff, Oliver & Finger, Robert, 2018. "Using involvement to reduce inconsistencies in risk preference elicitation," Journal of Behavioral and Experimental Economics (formerly The Journal of Socio-Economics), Elsevier, vol. 73(C), pages 22-33.
    16. Andrea Hackethal & Michael Kirchler & Christine Laudenbach & Michael Razen & Annika Weber, 2020. "On the role of monetary incentives in risk preference elicitation experiments," Working Papers 2020-29, Faculty of Economics and Statistics, Universität Innsbruck.
    17. Nicolas Jacquemet & Jean-Louis Rullière & Isabelle Vialle, 2007. "Contrôle des activités illégales en présence d'un biais d'optimisme," Revue économique, Presses de Sciences-Po, vol. 58(3), pages 555-564.
    18. Koellinger, Ph.D. & Treffers, T., 2012. "Joy leads to Overconfidence, and a Simple Remedy," ERIM Report Series Research in Management ERS-2012-001-STR, Erasmus Research Institute of Management (ERIM), ERIM is the joint research institute of the Rotterdam School of Management, Erasmus University and the Erasmus School of Economics (ESE) at Erasmus University Rotterdam.
    19. Almeida, Sergio, 2019. "Do as I Do, Not as I Say: Incentivization and the Relationship Between Cognitive Ability and Risk Aversion," Revista Brasileira de Economia - RBE, EPGE Brazilian School of Economics and Finance - FGV EPGE (Brazil), vol. 73(4), December.
    20. Ertac, Seda, 2011. "Does self-relevance affect information processing? Experimental evidence on the response to performance and non-performance feedback," Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization, Elsevier, vol. 80(3), pages 532-545.

    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:hal:cesptp:halshs-00272928. 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: CCSD (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://hal.archives-ouvertes.fr/ .

    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.