A Horserace of Methods for Eliciting Induced Beliefs Online

Daniel Banko-Ferran, Valeria Burdea and Jonathan Woon
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Daniel Banko-Ferran: University of Pittsburgh
Valeria Burdea: LMU Munich
Jonathan Woon: University of Pittsburgh

No 562, Rationality and Competition Discussion Paper Series from CRC TRR 190 Rationality and Competition

Abstract: This study evaluates the effectiveness of three widely used belief elicitation methods in an online setting: the binarized scoring rule (BSR), the stochastic Becker-DeGroot-Marschak mechanism (BDM), and unincentivized introspection. Despite the theoretical advantages of incentive-compatible methods (BSR and BDM), we find that they impose significantly higher cognitive costs on participants, requiring more time and effort to implement, without delivering clear improvements in belief accuracy. In fact, BSR systematically leads to greater errors in reported beliefs compared to introspection, while BDM also reduces accuracy, though to a lesser extent. Surprisingly, individual differences in probabilistic reasoning skills do not mitigate these errors for BSR but do help improve accuracy under BDM. Our findings suggest that simpler, unincentivized approaches may offer comparable or even superior accuracy at a lower cognitive cost. These results have broad implications for the design of experiments and the interpretation of belief data in behavioral and experimental economics.

Keywords: belief elicitation; induced beliefs; incentives; online experiment (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C81 C89 D83 D91 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2026-01-20
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-exp and nep-neu
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