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Contribution Details

Type Working Paper
Scope Discipline-based scholarship
Title Self-serving biases in beliefs about collective outcomes
Organization Unit
Authors
  • Shimon Kogan
  • Florian H Schneider
  • Roberto A. Weber
Language
  • English
Institution University of Zurich
Series Name Working paper series / Department of Economics
Number 379
ISSN 1664-705X
Number of Pages 65
Date 2021
Abstract Text Beliefs about collective outcomes, such as economic growth or firm profitability, play an important role in many contexts. We study biases in the formation of such beliefs. Specifically, we explore whether over-optimism and self-serving biases in information processing—documented for beliefs about individual outcomes—affect beliefs about collective outcomes. We find that people indeed exhibit self-serving biases for collective outcomes, and that such biases are similar to biases for individual outcomes. In addition, we investigate whether collective selfdelusion is mitigated by market institutions. If anything, biases in information processing are more pronounced in the presence of a market.
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Other Identification Number merlin-id:20863
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Keywords Beliefs, Bayes’ rule, asymmetric updating, overconfidence, motivated reasoning