This paper presents a reconciliation of the three distinct ways in which the economic literature has defined overconfidence: (1) overestimation of one's actual performance, (2) overestimation of one's performance relative to others, and (3) overestimation of the quality of one's private signals....

The status-enhancement theory of overconfidence proposes that overconfidence pervades self-judgment because it helps people attain higher social status. Prior work has found that highly confident individuals attained higher status regardless of whether their confidence was justified by actual...

In explaining the prevalence of the overconfident belief that one is better than others, prior work has focused on the motive to maintain high self‐esteem, abetted by biases in attention, memory, and cognition. An additional possibility is that overconfidence enhances the person’s social...

We develop a model of fragile self-esteem — self-esteem that is vulnerable to objectively unjustified swings — and study its implications for choices that depend on, or are aimed to protect, one's self-view. We assume that a person's self-esteem is determined by sampling from his store of...