Anxiety, overconfidence, and excessive risk taking

We provide a preference-based rationale for endogenous overconfidence. Horizon-dependent risk aversion, combined with a possibility to forget, can generate overconfidence and excessive risk taking in equilibrium. An "anxiety prone" agent, who is more risk-averse to imminent than to distant risks, has an incentive to distort her future self's beliefs toward underestimating risk. Such self-deception can be achieved even if the future self is aware of the attempted distortion. We relate our results to the literature on empirically observed overconfidence and excessive risk taking in several domains of financial and other types of decision making.