How to Counteract Biased Self-Assessments? an Experimental of Reactions to Social Information

In a lab experiment, we investigate whether social information can improve the accuracy of self-assessments of relative performance. In particular, we compare the effectiveness of different types of social information: subjects either learn their close peers' (i) average ab-solute performance, (ii) average self-assessment or (iii) average bias of self-assessments. Additionally, we explore the demand for the different types of social information. Our re-sults suggest that social information can help debiasing subjects' self-assessments, but not all types of information are equally effective. Only learning about the average bias of peers improves self-assessments. Subjects are, in general, willing to pay for social information but mostly prefer information about their peers' absolute performance, which is not help-ful. Nevertheless, self-selected information on peers' average bias triggers a stronger reac-tion to the information.(c) 2022 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.