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The effects of (incentivized) belief elicitation in public goods experiments

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  • Simon Gächter
  • Elke Renner

Abstract

Belief elicitation is an important methodological issue for experimental economists. There are two generic questions: 1) Do incentives increase belief accuracy? 2) Are there interaction effects of beliefs and decisions? We investigate these questions in the case of finitely repeated public goods experiments. We find that belief accuracy is significantly higher when beliefs are incentivized. The relationship between contributions and beliefs is slightly steeper under incentives. However, we find that incentivized beliefs tend to lead to higher contribution levels than either non-incentivized beliefs or no beliefs at all. We discuss the implications of our results for the design of public good experiments.
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  • Simon Gächter & Elke Renner, 2010. "The effects of (incentivized) belief elicitation in public goods experiments," Experimental Economics, Springer;Economic Science Association, vol. 13(3), pages 364-377, September.
    • Handle: RePEc:kap:expeco:v:13:y:2010:i:3:p:364-377
    DOI: 10.1007/s10683-010-9246-4
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    More about this item

    Keywords

    Incentives; Beliefs; Experimental methodology; Public goods; C 90;
    All these keywords.

    JEL classification:

    • C90 - Mathematical and Quantitative Methods - - Design of Experiments - - - General

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