Konferenzbeitrag

Motivated belief updating and rationalization of information

We study belief updating about relative performance in an ego-relevant task. Manipulating beliefs about the ego-relevance of the task, we show that subjects update their beliefs about relative performance more optimistically as direct belief utility increases. This finding provides clean evidence for the optimistic belief updating hypothesis and supports theoretical models with direct belief utility. Moreover, we document that subjects ex-post rationalize information by discounting their beliefs about the ego-relevance of the task as the number of bad signals increases. Taken together, these findings suggest that subjects use two alternative strategies to protect their ego despite the presence of objective information.

Sprache
Englisch

Erschienen in
Series: Beiträge zur Jahrestagung des Vereins für Socialpolitik 2021: Climate Economics

Klassifikation
Wirtschaft
Design of Experiments: Laboratory, Individual
Search; Learning; Information and Knowledge; Communication; Belief; Unawareness
Expectations; Speculations
Thema
Motivated beliefs
Optimistic belief updating
Direct belief utility
Bayes' rule
Ex-post rationalization

Ereignis
Geistige Schöpfung
(wer)
Drobner, Christoph
Goerg, Sebastian J.
Ereignis
Veröffentlichung
(wer)
ZBW - Leibniz Information Centre for Economics
(wo)
Kiel, Hamburg
(wann)
2021

Handle
Letzte Aktualisierung
10.03.2025, 11:43 MEZ

Datenpartner

Dieses Objekt wird bereitgestellt von:
ZBW - Deutsche Zentralbibliothek für Wirtschaftswissenschaften - Leibniz-Informationszentrum Wirtschaft. Bei Fragen zum Objekt wenden Sie sich bitte an den Datenpartner.

Objekttyp

  • Konferenzbeitrag

Beteiligte

  • Drobner, Christoph
  • Goerg, Sebastian J.
  • ZBW - Leibniz Information Centre for Economics

Entstanden

  • 2021

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