Date: November 30th, 2023 (12:30 pm – 1:30 pm)

Speaker: Marie Claire Villeval

Paper Title: “Selective Information Sharing and Group Delusion”

Abstract: Although in many situations groups make better decisions than individuals, groups also often make mistakes. We investigate experimentally one possible source
of sub-optimal decision-making by groups: the selective and asymmetric sharing of ego-relevant information among team members. We show that good news about
one’s performance is shared more often with team members than bad news. The biased information sharing within teams, together with selection neglect by the
receivers, induces higher team confidence compared to an unbiased exchange of performance feedback. As a result, weak teams end up making worse investment
decisions in a bet whose success depends on the team ability. The endogenous social exchange of ego-relevant information may thus lead to detrimental group delusion.

Bio: Marie Claire Villeval’s main research interests are behavioral and experimental economics applied to the analysis of incentives, social norms, ethics and dishonesty, motivated beliefs and biases in the transmission of information. She is Research Professor at the National Center for Scientific Research (CNRS) and the head of GATE-Lab at the University of Lyon, France. She is the Past-President of the Economic Science Association (ESA) and the founding President of the French association of experimental economics (ASFEE). She is a Fellow of the European Association of Labour Economists (EALE) and a member of the Academia Europaea, IZA and GLO. She has been awarded the Silver Medal of CNRS in 2017. She is Department Editor at Management Science.