Motivated Interpretation of Feedback Informativeness

People typically switch between tasks in both education and business. After completing each task, they often receive relative feedback on their performance - whether they did better or worse than others. Such feedback has been shown to influence not only individuals’ beliefs, but also their willingness to compete (Möbius et al., 2022). Although most articles focus on people's reactions to feedback within the same task, some studies show that people can transfer feedback from one task to another. For example, Banerjee with co-authors showed that people are more willing to compete in a ‘Ball-in-Bucket’ game if they outperformed median participant in a memory task, and vice versa (Banerjee et al., 2020). This leads to suboptimal decisions: people earn less money if they underestimate their chances of winning and choose a piece rate instead of a tournament, or vice versa. My question is: how do people perceive the informativeness of relative feedback for their performance in other tasks? To address this question, I am conducting a two-stage experiment.