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

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  • Simon Gaechter

    () (University of Nottingham)

  • Elke Renner

    () (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.

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Bibliographic Info

Paper provided by The Centre for Decision Research and Experimental Economics, School of Economics, University of Nottingham in its series Discussion Papers with number 2006-16.

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Date of creation: Sep 2006
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Handle: RePEc:cdx:dpaper:2006-16

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Keywords: Incentives; beliefs; experiments; public goods;

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  1. Dufwenberg, Martin & Gneezy, Uri, 2000. "Measuring Beliefs in an Experimental Lost Wallet Game," Games and Economic Behavior, Elsevier, vol. 30(2), pages 163-182, February.
  2. Muller, Laurent & Sefton, Martin & Steinberg, Richard & Vesterlund, Lise, 2008. "Strategic behavior and learning in repeated voluntary contribution experiments," Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization, Elsevier, vol. 67(3-4), pages 782-793, September.
  3. repec:bla:restud:v:75:y:2008:i:3:p:729-762 is not listed on IDEAS
  4. Selten, Reinhard, 1996. "Axiomatic Characterization of the Quadratic Scoring Rule," Discussion Paper Serie B 390, University of Bonn, Germany.
  5. Croson, Rachel T. A., 2000. "Thinking like a game theorist: factors affecting the frequency of equilibrium play," Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization, Elsevier, vol. 41(3), pages 299-314, March.
  6. Mariana Blanco & Dirk Engelmann & Alexander Koch & Hans-Theo Normann, 2010. "Belief elicitation in experiments: is there a hedging problem?," Experimental Economics, Springer, vol. 13(4), pages 412-438, December.
  7. Offerman, Theo & Sonnemans, Joep & Schram, Arthur, 1996. "Value Orientations, Expectations and Voluntary Contributions in Public Goods," Economic Journal, Royal Economic Society, vol. 106(437), pages 817-45, July.
  8. Palfrey, Thomas R. & Wang, Stephanie W., . "On eliciting beliefs in strategic games," Working Papers 1271, California Institute of Technology, Division of the Humanities and Social Sciences.
  9. Kocher, Martin G. & Cherry, Todd & Kroll, Stephan & Netzer, Robert J. & Sutter, Matthias, 2008. "Conditional cooperation on three continents," Economics Letters, Elsevier, vol. 101(3), pages 175-178, December.
  10. Greiner, Ben, 2004. "An Online Recruitment System for Economic Experiments," MPRA Paper 13513, University Library of Munich, Germany.
  11. Yaw Nyarko & Andrew Schotter, 2002. "An Experimental Study of Belief Learning Using Elicited Beliefs," Econometrica, Econometric Society, vol. 70(3), pages 971-1005, May.
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