Speaker: Dagmara Celik Katreniak (Research Fellow at the Center for Institutional Studies, International Research Laboratory for Institutional Analysis of Economic Reforms)
People are usually optimistic about their outcomes. Poor performing people have a tendency to overestimate their performance; well performing people have a tendency to underestimate their performance. Existing literature has studied what is behind such mis-estimation of the quality of someone’s performance and the results suggest that poor performers lack insight into their mistakes. A field experiment conducted in Uganda offers ground for studying whether informing students about their standing compared to other students helps to minimize the gap between students’ self evaluation and their real outcomes. Due to the random assignment of students into two treatment groups that differed by the type of information students received and by the group students were compared to, I am able to study the causal relationship of feedback provision on students’ (over)confidence. All results presented are preliminary and can contain errors.
