Belief Elicitation: Limiting Truth Telling with Information on Incentives

We study truth telling within the current state-of-the-art mechanism for belief elicitation and examine how information on incentives affects reports on a known objective prior. We find that transparent information on incentives gives rise to error rates in excess of 40 percent, and that only 15 percent of participants consistently report the truth. False reports are conservative and appear to result from a biased perception of the BSR incentives. While attempts to debias are somewhat successful, the highest degree of truth telling occurs when information on quantitative incentives is withheld. Perversely the mechanism’s incentives are shown to decrease truthful reporting.