Suchergebnisse

We investigate how the gender gap in confidence affects the views that evaluators (e.g., employers) hold about men and women. We find the confidence gap is contagious, causing evaluators to form overly pessimistic beliefs about women. This result arises even though the confidence gap is expected and even though the confidence gap shouldn't be contagious if evaluators are Bayesian. Only an intervention that facilitates Bayesian updating proves (somewhat) effective. Additional results highlight how similar findings follow even when there is no room for discriminatory motives or differences in priors because evaluators are asked about arbitrary, rather than gender-specific, groups. (JEL D82, D83, D91, J16, J22, M51)

Myriad environments allow for the possibility of confusion. Agents may appeal to such confusion—or the possibility of making an honest mistake—to justify their behavior. In three sets of experiments involving thousands of subjects, we document evidence of such motivated errors. We document this evidence in a simple environment in which the scope for errors is small and in more complex environments in which subjects display correlation neglect and an anchoring bias. (JEL C91, D12, D64, D81, D83, D91)

AbstractA rich literature finds that individuals avoid information and suggests that avoidance is driven by image concerns. This paper provides the first direct test of whether individuals avoid information because of image concerns. We build on a classic paradigm, introducing control conditions that make minimal changes to eliminate the role of image concerns while keeping other key features of the environment unchanged. Data from 6,421 experimental subjects shows that image concerns play a role in driving information avoidance, but a role that is substantially smaller than one might have expected.