There exists extensive evidence that people learn positively about themselves. We build on this finding to develop a model of team formation in the workplace. We show that learning positively about oneself systematically undermines the formation of teams. Agents becoming overconfident tend to...

We use peer assessments as a tool to allocate joint profits in a real effort team experiment. We find that using this incentive mechanism reduces team performance. More specifically, we show that teams composed of fellows rather than strangers actually underperform in a context of peer...

We develop a model of team formation in which workers learn about their level of ability. We show that insufficient cooperation may arise as workers learn positively about their own skills. We then build a model for team managers and establish that their objectivity in assessing coworkers'...

We develop a principal-agent model in which the principal has access to hard and soft information about the agent’s level of effort. We model the soft signal as being informative about the agent’s level of effort but manipulable by the agent at a cost. We show that the presence of influence...

The main objective of this paper is to analyze the impact of uninformative communications on asset prices. An experimental approach allows us to control for the release of a priori uninformative messages. We introduce the release of messages in standard experimental asset markets with bubbles...