Date/Time Date(s) - 01/03/202312:30 pm - 1:30 pm
Alexander Coutts, Assitant Professor at Schulich School of Business, York University, will present to our economic graduate students and faculty on Wednesday, March 1 in KTH 334!
Alexander’s primary area of research is behavioural economics, using field and lab experiments to understand broad interactions between information, beliefs, and behaviour. His work on motivated beliefs studies whether and how belief formation and updating can lead to overconfidence, optimism, and discrimination. In other areas of his research, he has utilized randomized controlled trials (RCTs) to investigate how information affects beliefs and behaviour in the context of the political resource curse in Mozambique and health in Guinea-Bissau.
Abstract
Overconfidence is considered to be one of the most prominent behavioral biases, and has been studied with students, executives, and investors using different variants of a confidence interval task with large intervals of 80% or 90%. On average this research has found that individuals are overprecise, leading this type of overconfidence to be labeled as the “most robust form of overconfidence” (Moore et al., 2015). We elicit both large (80%) and small (20%) confidence intervals regarding the future price of a simulated asset. We find that only 18% of individuals are consistently overprecise, compared to 28% which are consistently underprecise. At the same time, and in line with the literature we replicate overprecision for the large interval. This suggests that aggregate overprecision may be a consequence of using large rather than small confidence intervals.
View Alexander’s professional website.