Nascent entrepreneurs often believe that their chances of success are better than those of others due to imperfect information about the competencies and accomplishments of other entrepreneurs, leading to overplacement. Theory suggests that the provision of historical outcome data of comparable projects could help entrepreneurs develop more realistic plans and expectations by closing the information gap and enabling the calibration of their beliefs. However, effectively calibrating beliefs by incorporating new reference information requires effortful cognitive processing and rational integration of the data, which may be impeded by the same cognitive biases leading to overplacement initially. Drawing from a unique dataset that allows us to observe substantial parts of the planning process of 971 entrepreneurs, we investigate the effectiveness of providing reference values as a debiasing tool. Rather than rationally leveraging the information for honest self-assessment, our findings suggest that entrepreneurs use the information to differentiate themselves even more from the reference group after they see the historical values. This, in turn, results in an even higher level of overplacement.JEL ClassificationsG41, D91, L26, L25.

中文翻译：

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有偏差的校准：参考值加剧而不是缓解创业过度

新生企业家常常认为，由于对其他企业家的能力和成就的信息不完全，他们成功的机会比其他人更好，从而导致过度安置。理论表明，提供可比项目的历史结果数据可以帮助企业家通过缩小信息差距并校准他们的信念来制定更现实的计划和期望。然而，通过纳入新的参考信息来有效地校准信念需要努力的认知处理和数据的合理整合，这可能会受到最初导致过度定位的相同认知偏差的阻碍。我们利用一个独特的数据集来观察 971 名企业家规划过程的大部分内容，研究了提供参考值作为去偏工具的有效性。我们的研究结果表明，企业家在看到历史价值后，会利用这些信息将自己与参考群体区分开来，而不是理性地利用这些信息进行诚实的自我评估。这反过来又导致更高水平的过度安置。JEL 分类G41、D91、L26、L25。