Nondistortionary belief elicitation
Theoretical Economics
2026-04-03 v2
Abstract
A researcher wants to ask a decision-maker about a belief related to a choice the decision-maker made; examples include eliciting confidence or cognitive uncertainty. When can the researcher provide incentives for the decision-maker to report her belief truthfully without distorting her choice? We identify necessary and sufficient conditions for nondistortionary elicitation and fully characterize all incentivizable questions in three canonical classes of problems. For these problems, we show how to elicit beliefs using variants of the Becker-DeGroot-Marschak mechanism.
Cite
@article{arxiv.2506.12167,
title = {Nondistortionary belief elicitation},
author = {Marcin Pęski and Colin Stewart},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2506.12167},
year = {2026}
}
Comments
belief elicitation, cognitive uncertainty, experimental design