Overestimation was addressed in this report:

Eddy, D. R., Gibbons, J. A., Storm, W. F., French, J., Stevens, K., Barton, E., … Hickey, P. (2005). An Assessment of Modafinil for Vestibular and Aviation-Related Effects (No. 2005-0129, ADA442742). Brooks City-Base TX: Air Force Research Laboratory.

See pp. 11 and 29-32.

I am not sure I follow well enough to provide an idea.  Can you give me a reference from published research literature that addresses something like you want to look further into?

Dear James,

Thanks a lot for your insightful report.

@Dale R. Pietrzak

Dear Dale,

As you know, anxious individuals show biases in information processing, such that they attend preferentially to threatening stimuli and interpret emotional ambiguity in a threatening way.  It has also been established that these biases in attention and interpretation can causally influence trait and state anxiety. As it, I'm considering how to evaluate such a trait and state in a simple way. 

Related literature:

1- Colin MacLeod, Elizabeth M. Rutherford, Anxiety and the selective processing of emotional information: Mediating roles of awareness, trait and state variables, and personal relevance of stimu, Behaviour Research and Therapy, Volume 30, Issue 5, September 1992, Pages 479-491, ISSN 0005-7967, http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/0005-7967(92)90032-C.

2- Lee Brosan, Laura Hoppitt, Lorna Shelfer, Alison Sillence, Bundy Mackintosh, Cognitive bias modification for attention and interpretation reduces trait and state anxiety in anxious patients referred to an out-patient service: Results from a pilot study, Journal of Behavior Therapy and Experimental Psychiatry, Volume 42, Issue 3, September 2011, Pages 258-264,

Well, for the pessimism/optimism assessment you might start with scales from the international item pool.  There are several that are listed throughout that may work for your idea.

http://ipip.ori.org/

I am not sure with the "cognitive bias consequences."

Dear Ehsan,

Please refer to the following article (attached) for some advice on this issue: 

Oreg, S.; Bayazit M. (2009): Prone to bias: Towards a theory of individual differences in bias manifestation. In: Review of General Psychology, 13(3): 175-193.

Dear Mahmut, 

Thank you very much indeed. Your research was exactly insightful and can be one of my important references. According your expertise, could you please help me with answering the following questions?

1- High self-confidence individuals even when not in a particular hurry, they will be more likely to view speeding to gain time and face simplification bias. How about competitive situation with a potential failure especially in making a decision about the firm? Do you have any idea in such a situation?

2- How do evaluate positive evaluation like overconfidence/unrealistic optimism?

I am glad I was able to help.  

1. We directly linked core self-evaluations with verification biases but simplification biases form the background for some of the biases in verification.  So high self-evaluators are generally more likely to ignore threats and be unrealistically optimistic about their chances of getting into an accident.  Though this does not mean that they necessarily underestimate others (rivals), they simply overestimate their own performance. In case of actual decisions one is better off looking into some of the regulation biases such as framing, endowment etc.  and approach and avoidance temperament.  

2. To evaluate overconfidence researchers generally use a multiple choice test of knowledge where a confidence rating follows each answer.  Overconfidence score is computed using the actual test answers and confidence ratings to wrong answers.  Unrealistic optimism is generally measured by providing respondents a list of positive and negative life events and asking them rate the likelihood of each happening to them. 

To measure Optimism and Pessimism as dispositional traits I used the Life-Orientation Scale - Revisited  

Scheier, M. F., Carver, C. S., & Bridges, M. W. (1996). Distinguishing optimism from neuroticism (and trait anxiety, self-mastery, and self-esteem): a reevaluation of the Life Orientation Test. Journal of personality and social psychology, 67 (6), 1063-1078.

Recently, a confirmatory factor analysis of the revisited scale has been performed by:

Jiang, W., Li, F., Jiang, H., Yu, L., Liu, W., Li, Q., & Zuo, L. (2014). Core self-evaluations mediate the associations of dispositional optimism and life satisfaction. PloS One, 9(6), e97752.

In entrepreneurship studies, some researchers have used indirect measure of optimism (comparative optimism). An example is: Ucbasaran, D., Westhead, P., Wright, M., & Flores, M. (2010). The nature of entrepreneurial experience, business failure and comparative optimism. Journal of Business Venturing, 25(6), 541-555.

Dear Paul, Michela and Mahmut,

I appreciated your contributions on my question. As you know, Spilberger(1966) is credited with articulating the distinction between momentary states and more enduring traits. I fully agree with the trait that you have mentioned, but i still think some details need to be discussed about the states. My question remains about the cognitive bias states of a decision maker. Do you have any contribution for the states?  

Maybe, the prospect theory could be a useful input for cognitive bias. In Daniel Kahneman's book (Thinking, fast and slow) I found lots of experiments in which cognitive biases have been analyzed.

(I am sorry, maybe I have not answered to your question)

I appreciate the work of Wiklund and al. on cognitive bias differences between entrepreneurs and managers

We have access to a french databasis with a question about time perception and age when you create a venture

If you want, we could exchange together

I did a qualitative research about overconfidence bias.... in french if you want it

Michela, Thanks for your contribution. I had read some works of Kahneman and Tversky about bias and others about two modes of thinking. Oreg and Bayazit recent work claim that the individual differences in verification bias can explain the extent to which a bias in interpretation of reality will occur and whether its direction will be to distort upward or downward.  May competitive situation(state) shift the trait form system 1 to system 2 ?

Cecile,

Thanks for your answer, Could you please share with me the English version of your questionnaire in overconfidence bias? 

About Wiklund et al(2010), I think you have uploaded a wrong file. Could you please send the file that mentioned in your answer.

Unfortunately, China don't have a same database to exchange. But for next research we can consider about collecting data on that topic in China. At the moment,my research is about the threat in shadow and its consequences on innovation and firm performance.