The role of self-confidence in teamwork: experimental evidence
通过实验室实验，发现过度自信能促使个体付出更多努力、减少搭便车行为，从而提高团队收益，且这一效果主要源于对自身努力的直接影响。
Teamwork has become increasingly important in modern organizations and the labor market. Yet, little is known about the role of self-confidence in teamwork. In this paper, we present evidence from a laboratory experiment using a team effort task. Effort and ability are complements and there are synergies between teammates' efforts. We exogenously manipulate subjects' self-confidence about their ability using easy and hard general knowledge quizzes. We find that overconfidence leads to more effort, less free riding, and higher team revenue. This finding is primarily due to a direct effect of overconfidence on own effort provision, while there is no evidence that subjects strategically respond to the teammate's overconfidence. Supplementary Information: The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1007/s10683-024-09829-x.