Mingye Ma

---

Mingye Ma is an experimental economist. His main research interests are in the areas of behavioural and experimental economics, and he is particularly interested in topics such as social learning, motivated beliefs and imitation. His joint experimental work on social learning suggests that when people can endogenously choose their information source, they overweight public information, not private. He also conducted field studies on overconfidence. His findings indicate that people may strategically inflate their beliefs about themselves to deal with problems of self-control. In other words, people engage in overconfident beliefs strategically. He is currently working on projects about individual's imitation behavior, especially the relationship between luck, ability and imitation. Jointly with other researchers, he also works on lab and field experiment on effort provision in groups.