Overconfidence can have important economic consequences, but has received little direct testing within the discipline. We test for overconfidence in forecasts of own absolute or relative performance in two unfamiliar experimental tasks. Given their choice of effort at the tasks, participants...

Systematic overconfidence by individuals regarding their abilities and prospects could have important economic consequences. But overconfidence has received little direct testing within economics. We use experiments to test for overconfidence in people's forecasts of their absolute or relative...