Feedback spillovers across tasks, self-confidence and competitiveness

Ritwik Banerjee (1) , Nabanita Datta Gupta (2) , Marie Claire Villeval (3)

1 IIMB - Indian Institute of Management Bangalore
2 Aarhus University [Aarhus]
3 GATE Lyon Saint-Étienne - Groupe d'Analyse et de Théorie Economique Lyon - Saint-Etienne

Does feedback on success in a task increase individuals' beliefs about their chance to succeed in a subsequent, unrelated, task? Does feedback on failure have a symmetric effect? Is the distortion of beliefs, possibly due to motivated beliefs, mistakes in updating or the feeling of having a lucky day, heterogeneous across individuals, in particular according to their status in the society? Conducting an artefactual field experiment in India with participants from different castes, we show that feedback on success in a forced competition in a first task increases winners' self-confidence and competitiveness in the subsequent task. Such feedback spillovers on self-confidence are asymmetric and heterogeneous according to status and more likely for already more confident individuals.

Mots clés: Feedback; spillovers; self-confidence; status; motivated beliefs; experiment

Domaines: Economies et finances; Economies et finances

Ritwik Banerjee, Nabanita Datta Gupta, Marie Claire Villeval. Feedback spillovers across tasks, self-confidence and competitiveness. Games and Economic Behavior, 2020, 123, pp.127-170. ⟨10.1016/j.geb.2020.07.002⟩. ⟨halshs-02908182⟩