ICES Experimental Economics Brown Bag Lecture
Action bias or Illusion of Control? The Impacts of Value Elicitation Mechanisms
Friday, February 13, 2026 4:00 PM to 5:00 PM EST
Vernon Smith Hall (formerly Metropolitan Building), Room 5075
The Interdisciplinary Center for Economic Science (ICES) presents an ICES Brown Bag Lecture featuring:
George Mason University
Action bias or Illusion of Control? The Impacts of Value Elicitation Mechanisms
Abstract
We set out to measure the relative effect sizes, if any, of the illusion of control and actions bias in simple games. To this end, we employ a stochastic game in which both illusion of control and action bias could play a role and a very similar deterministic game, which should only be affected by action bias. In both cases, subjects can either buy, or sell, the right to be a more active (though not a more influential or controlling), participant in their assigned game. In the first experiment, we measure subjects willingness to pay, or willingness to accept payment, for this right through third price auctions and can thereby compare the prevalence, and strength, of illusion of control and action bias, respectively. Upon observing seemingly implausibly large measures of action bias in our original experiment, on the order of $1, we follow up with a simplified experiment attempting to control from biases induced by the value elicitation procedure. We trade off the fineness of our value measure for simplicity and, we suspect, subject understanding. In both experiments we do not find a unique effect which we can ascribe to the illusion of control, but we do pick up a very large action bias in the first experiment and a slight one in the second experiment. Moreover, in both experiments we pick up on a large framing effect, with willingness to pay and willingness to ask measures differing significantly, though in opposite directions depending on the elicitation mechanism.
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