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

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  14 March 2025

Simon Gächter  and
Elke Renner
Simon Gächter*
Affiliation:
School of Economics, Centre for Decision Research and Experimental Economics, University of Nottingham, Sir Clive Granger Building, University Park, Nottingham, NG7 2RD, UK CESifo, Munich, Germany IZA, Bonn, Germany
Elke Renner*
Affiliation:
School of Economics, Centre for Decision Research and Experimental Economics, University of Nottingham, Sir Clive Granger Building, University Park, Nottingham, NG7 2RD, UK
*
e-mail: [email protected]
e-mail: [email protected]
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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.

Keywords

IncentivesBeliefsExperimental methodologyPublic goods
Type
Research Article
Information
Experimental Economics , Volume 13 , Issue 3 , September 2010 , pp. 364 - 377
Copyright
Copyright © Economic Science Association 2010

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Footnotes

Electronic supplementary material The online version of this article (doi: 10.1007/s10683-010-9246-4) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users.

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