A study that looked at how entrepreneurs’ confidence levels change depending on market conditions has been corrected to fix an error that flipped the results of one of the experiments.
The paper was published in 2013 by the Strategic Management Journal, and explored how entrepreneurs stay confident in difficult marketplaces by studying how people reacted to tasks of varying difficulty. In one experiment, participants were asked how well they thought they did on an easy quiz and how well they did on a hard quiz. Results showed that “participants underestimated their scores on the easy quiz” and “overestimated their performance on the difficult quiz.” However, authors wrote the opposite in the final paper.
Here’s the correction notice for “Making Sense of Overconfidence in Market Entry”:
In Cain et al., 2015, an error was published in the Results section.
Results, page 5
Manipulation checks
These results show that, similar to prior research, participants overestimated their scores on the easy quiz, t (159) = 6.76, p < 0.001, and underestimated their performance on the difficult quiz, t (159) = 5.40, p < 0.001.
The text was incorrect and should have read:
Results, page 5
Manipulation checks
These results show that, similar to prior research, participants underestimated their scores on the easy quiz, t (159) = 6.76, p < 0.001, and overestimated their performance on the difficult quiz, t (159) = 5.40, p < 0.001.
We apologize for this error.
When reached by email for comment, corresponding author Daylian Cain, an associate professor at the Yale School of Management, said:
It was merely a typo that one of us noticed. We missed it somehow.
In a statement signed by all four journal editors, Richard Bettis, Alfonso Gambardella, Constance Helfat and Will Mitchell said that the authors reached out and asked for a correction:
Thank you for your note and interest. The revision occurred when the authors reached out to the journal to let us know about the error. We then posted the correction.
The study has only been cited by the correction notice, according to Thomson Scientific’s Web of Knowledge.
Hat tip: Philipp
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