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Apparent overconfidence. (English) Zbl 1271.91093

Summary: It is common for a majority of people to rank themselves as better than average on simple tasks and worse than average on difficult tasks. The literature takes for granted that this apparent misconfidence is problematic. We argue, however, that this behavior is consistent with purely rational Bayesian updaters. In fact, better-than-average data alone cannot be used to show overconfidence; we indicate which type of data can be used. Our theory is consistent with empirical patterns found in the literature.

MSC:

91E10 Cognitive psychology
62P25 Applications of statistics to social sciences
62-07 Data analysis (statistics) (MSC2010)
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