Do Self-theories on Intelligence Explain Overconfidence and Risk Taking? A Field Experiment

The way individuals perceive their intelligence plays an important role on people's motivation, achievement and self-assessment accuracy as shown by Carol Dweck's life-long research. In behavioral economics, overconfidence is shown to play an important role in individual's preferences and choices. In this paper, we conducted a field experiment to investigate whether self-theories impact overconfidence. Early career Vietnamese executives pursuing an MBA were incentivized. Our sample of managers and professionals controls for a wide range of corporate and demographic variables. The main result of our paper is that self-theories impact overconfidence when taking into account income. As in previous studies, we also find that subjects exhibit significant absolute overconfidence. Gender does not have any impact on overconfidence. We also tested the relationships between self-theories and risk taking.