A penny for your thoughts: A Survey of methods for eliciting beliefs

Author(s)
Karl Schlag, James Tremewan, Joel van der Weele
Abstract

Incentivized methods for eliciting subjective probabilities in economic experiments present the subject with risky choices that encourage truthful reporting. We discuss the most prominent elicitation methods and their underlying assumptions, provide theoretical comparisons and give a new justification for the quadratic scoring rule. On the empirical side, we survey the performance of these elicitation methods in actual experiments, considering also practical issues of implementation such as order effects, hedging, and different ways of presenting probabilities and payment schemes to experimental subjects. We end with a discussion of the trade-offs involved in using incentives for belief elicitation and some guidelines for implementation.

Organisation(s)
Department of Economics
External organisation(s)
University of Amsterdam (UvA)
Journal
Experimental Economics
Volume
18
Pages
457 - 490
ISSN
1386-4157
DOI
https://doi.org/10.1007/s10683-014-9416-x
Publication date
08-2014
Peer reviewed
Yes
Austrian Fields of Science 2012
502047 Economic theory
Portal url
https://ucrisportal.univie.ac.at/en/publications/78f95cfa-3a64-4291-ba47-64fc6f71b7cf