Belief elicitation under competing motivations: Does it matter how you ask?
通过捐赠实验比较不同信念测量方法，发现无激励时信念存在自利偏差，简单激励无法消除，但突出准确预测金钱回报的激励方法可减少偏差。
Beliefs, alongside preferences, are an important driver of behaviour. While preferences are often inferred by the choices made, measuring beliefs is not straightforward. We design a giving experiment to compare different methods of measuring beliefs, with and without monetary incentives. Consistent with a simple theoretical framework, we find that elicited beliefs about the giving decisions of others are biased and self-serving when no incentive is offered, with non-donors reporting that giving is rare. Offering a simple incentive does not reduce the bias in beliefs; however, this bias is not observed when using an incentivised method which makes the monetary outcome associated with accurately predicting beliefs more prominent. Our findings suggest that when self-interested motivations compete with accuracy incentives, beliefs are sensitive to how they are measured.