Belief Elicitation: Limiting Truth Telling with Information on Incentives

David Danz, Lise Vesterlund and Alistair Wilson

No 8048, CESifo Working Paper Series from CESifo

Abstract: We study truth telling within the current state-of-the-art mechanism for belief elicitation and examine how information on incentives affects reports on a known objective prior. We find that transparent information on incentives gives rise to error rates in excess of 40 percent, and that only 15 percent of participants consistently report the truth. False reports are conservative and appear to result from a biased perception of the BSR incentives. While attempts to debias are somewhat successful, the highest degree of truth telling occurs when information on quantitative incentives is withheld. Perversely the mechanism’s incentives are shown to decrease truthful reporting.

Keywords: incentive compatibility; belief elicitation; binarized scoring rule; experiments (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C90 D80 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2020
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-upt
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (36)

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Working Paper: Belief Elicitation: Limiting Truth Telling with Information on Incentives (2020)
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:ces:ceswps:_8048

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