Overconfidence and Career Choice

Overconfidence and Career Choice

People self-assess their relative ability when making career choices. Thus, confidence in their own abilities is likely an important factor for selection into various career paths. In a sample of 711 first-year students we examine whether there are systematic differences in confidence levels across fields of study. We find that our experimental confidence measures significantly vary between fie...

Career Concerns and Career Choice ∗

In many industries workers face a choice between high and low visibility jobs. The former let all potential employers observe performance, the latter only the current employer. This paper argues that workers getting a positive initial signal about their talent are willing to incur costs to work in high visibility jobs in order to avoid a hold up problem with the current employer in the second p...

Ego Utility, Overconfidence, and Task Choice

This paper models behavior when a decision maker cares about and manages her self-image. In addition to having preferences over material outcomes, the agent derives “ego utility” from positive views about her ability to do well in a skill-sensitive, “ambitious,” task. Although she uses Bayes’ rule to update beliefs, she tends to become overconfident regarding which task is appropriate for her. ...

Career choice and climate change

Holland’s Theory and Career Choice

Copyright © 2002. Lawrence K. Jones. All rights reserved. Not to be copied in any form without written permission of the author. The author may be contacted at North Carolina State University, Box 7801, Raleigh, NC 27695, [email protected], or at his home office at [email protected]. Your personality type: Realistic Investigative Artistic Enterprising Conventional Compatible work en...