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

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.