The Effects of (Incentivized) Belief Elicitation in Public Good Experiments

Simon Gaechter () and Elke Renner ()
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Simon Gaechter: University of Nottingham
Elke Renner: University of Nottingham
Authors registered in the RePEc Author Service: Simon Gächter ()

No 2006-16, Discussion Papers from The Centre for Decision Research and Experimental Economics, School of Economics, University of Nottingham

Abstract: We investigate the impact of eliciting beliefs about the average contribution of other group members in finitely repeated public goods experiments. We find that belief accuracy is significantly higher when beliefs are incentivized. The distribution of beliefs as well as the relationship between contributions and beliefs are unaffected by incentives. Eliciting incentivized beliefs increases contribution levels relative to a benchmark treatment without belief elicitation, and significantly so in the latter half of the experiment. This result contradicts Croson (2000). We discuss the implications of our results for the design of experiments.

Keywords: Incentives; beliefs; experiments; public goods (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C90 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-cbe, nep-exp and nep-soc
Date: 2006-09
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Persistent link: http://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:cdx:dpaper:2006-16

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