Closing Remarks on Overconfidence in Business and Beyond

Abstract

This chapter summarizes the main contributions on the overconfidence phenomenon discussed in this monograph. It also provides the key literature to offer the reader an in-depth analysis of the phenomenon in business and beyond. The starting point, after discussing what is overconfidence and how it can be measured, revolves around the implications of an overconfident attitude in small business management. This chapter goes further in discussing ways to reduce overconfidence when hubris and the excessive use of heuristics kick in. In this sense, it presents the advantages of using integrate software systems to reduce overconfidence. To further assess the impact of overconfidence in day-by-day decisions, the chapters present the findings on overconfidence in another different domain, sport, where women show the opposite bias, underconfidence, because of the uncertainty related to the performance and because of defensive pessimism, a strategy used to cope with the chance of failure in a male-dominated task. Across the brief chapter, there is a holistic discussion on how to improve accuracy in judgment and some key methodological routes to actually be able to measure overconfidence. Specifically, the book as a whole discusses how to conduct experiments, use large secondary datasets or psychological scales to assess the phenomenon from a different angle. The approach of this chapter and the citations used are at the interception between psychology and entrepreneurship, This chapter closes with a manifesto in 11 points.