Learning About One's Self

Le Yaouanq, Yves and Schwardmann, Peter (2022): Learning About One's Self. In: Journal of the European Economic Association, Vol. 20, No. 5: pp. 1791-1828

Abstract

To understand why naivete about present-biased behavior is so prevalent and persistent, our experiment investigates how well participants learn from their past behavior in a real-effort task. While participants display naive present-biased behavior initially, our novel methodology allows us to establish that their updating is unbiased and would eliminate naivete in the long run. Moreover, learning is unencumbered by a change in the environment. Our results suggest that persistent naivete does not result from a fundamental inferential bias. However, participants underestimate their future learning-a bias that may lead to underinvestment in experimentation and a failure to activate self-regulation mechanisms.

• Item Type: Journal article
• Faculties: Munich School of Management
• Subjects: 300 Social sciences > 330 Economics
• ISSN: 1542-4766
• Language: English