Many studies have shown that people display an apparent overconfidence. In particular, it is common for a majority of people to describe themselves as better-than-average. The literature takes for granted that this better-than-average is problematic. We argue, however, that, even accepting these...

Many studies have shown that people display an apparent overconfidence. In particular, it is common for a majority of people to describe themselves as better than average. The literature takes for granted that this better-than-average effect is problematic. We argue, however, that, even...

Many studies have shown that people display an apparent overconfidence. In particular, it is common for a majority of people to describe themselves as better-than-average. The literature takes for granted that this better-than-average effect is problematic. We argue, however, that, even...

We conduct two experiements of the claim that people are overconfident. We develop new tests of overplacement which are based on a formal Bayesian model. Our two experiments, on easy quizzes, find overplacement. More precisely, we find apparently overconfident data that cannot be accounted for...

Numerous experiments have demonstrated the possibility of attitude polarization. For instance, Lord, Ross & Lepper (1979) partitioned subjects into two groups, according to whether or not they believed the death penalty had a deterrent effect, and presented them with a set of studies on the...

In a standard search model I relax the assumption that agents know the distribution of offers and characterize the behavioral and welfare consequences of overconfidence. Optimistic individuals search longer if they are equally stubborn and high offers are good news. Otherwise, the pessimists...

Auction theory has emphasized the importance of private information to the profits of bidders. However, the theory has failed to consider the question of whether or not bidders will be able to keep their information private. We show that in a variety of contexts bidders will reveal all their...

Policemen are known to support colleagues who are the subject of criminal investigations. While we might expect guilty officers to defend each other, why do law-abiding policemen defend those who have broken the law? We investigate under what conditions it is in the interest of a group to defend...

We fully characterize the preferences relations that can be represented by a utility. Representation is equivalent to the condition that preferences do not have too many "jumps". A characterization of preferences that can be represented by a continuous utility follows trivially from our...