Abstract:
It is generally believed that individuals imitate others to gain status, minimise regret or simply ameliorate their performance. Psychology provides a complementary explanation: imitation becomes appealing when agents have little faith in their abilities. We investigate the extent to which self-efficacy beliefs affect agents’ propensities to imitate others. We propose an experimental task, which is a modified version of the two-armed bandit. We measure participants’ self-assessed self-efficacy, then study individual learning. Subsequently, we measure how individuals use the information they gather observing a randomly selected group leader. We find that, in stable environments, a 1% increase in individual self-efficacy reduces the propensity to imitate others by 3%.
Citation:
Innocenti, S., & Cowan, R. (2019), 'Self-efficacy beliefs and imitation: A two-armed bandit experiment', 'European Economic Review', Vol. 113, pp. 156–172, Elsevier BV, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.euroecorev.2018.12.009