This paper suggests that the evolutionarily optimal belief of an agent's intrinsic reproductive ability is systematically different from the posterior belief obtained by the perfect Bayesian updating. In particular, the optimal belief depends on how risk-averse the agent is. Although the perfect...

This paper provides an evolutionary justification for overconfidence. Players are pairwise matched to compete for a resource, and there is uncertainty about who will win the resource if they choose to compete. Players have different confidence levels about their chance of winning, although in...