Overconfidence in warfare

Bayesian Overconfidence

We study three distinct measures of overconfidence: (1) overestimation of one’s performance, (2) overplacement of one’s performance relative to others, and (3) overprecision in one’s belief about private signals. We show how a simple Bayesian model with uncertainty about task difficulty predicts overplacement and underestimation after unexpectedly easy tasks and underplacement and overestimatio...

Overconfidence in Human Judgement

Overconfidence in interval estimates.

Judges were asked to make numerical estimates (e.g., "In what year was the first flight of a hot air balloon?"). Judges provided high and low estimates such that they were X% sure that the correct answer lay between them. They exhibited substantial overconfidence: The correct answer fell inside their intervals much less than X% of the time. This contrasts with choices between 2 possible answers...

Trouble with Overconfidence 1 Running head: TROUBLE WITH OVERCONFIDENCE The Trouble with Overconfidence

This paper presents a reconciliation of the three distinct ways in which the research literature has defined overconfidence: (1) overestimation of one’s actual performance, (2) overplacement of one’s performance relative to others, and (3) excessive precision in one’s beliefs. Experimental evidence shows that reversals of the first two (apparent underconfidence), when they occur, tend to be on ...

Reducing Overconfidence in Spreadsheet Development

Despite strong evidence of widespread errors, spreadsheet developers rarely subject their spreadsheets to post-development testing to reduce errors. This may be because spreadsheet developers are overconfident in the accuracy of their spreadsheets. This conjecture is plausible because overconfidence is present in a wide variety of human cognitive domains, even among experts. This paper describe...