Self-Serving Biases in Beliefs about Collective Outcomes

Arbeitspapier

Beliefs about collective outcomes, such as economic growth or firm profitability, play an important role in many contexts. We study biases in the formation of such beliefs. Specifically, we explore whether over-optimism and self-serving biases in information processing—documented for beliefs about individual outcomes—affect beliefs about collective outcomes. We find that people indeed exhibit self-serving biases for collective outcomes, and that such biases are similar to biases for individual outcomes. In addition, we investigate whether collective self-delusion is mitigated by market institutions. If anything, biases in information processing are more pronounced in the presence of a market.

Object Details

• Language: Englisch

References and Relationships

• Bibliographic citation: Series: CESifo Working Paper ; No. 8975

Classification and Topics

• Classification: Wirtschaft ; Health: Government Policy; Regulation; Public Health ; Field Experiments ; Economic Sociology; Economic Anthropology; Language; Social and Economic Stratification
• Subject: beliefs ; Bayes’ rule ; asymmetric updating ; overconfidence ; motivated reasoning

Contributors, Places and Time

• Event: Geistige Schöpfung
• (who): Kogan, Shimon ; Schneider, Florian H. ; Weber, Roberto A.
• Event: Veröffentlichung
• (who): Center for Economic Studies and Ifo Institute (CESifo)
• (where): Munich
• (when): 2021

Further information

• Handle: http://hdl.handle.net/10419/235345
• Last update: 10.03.2025, 11:43 AM CET