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WP_SES_544.pdf
Research report

Compressed Beliefs

BP2-STS

  • Fribourg : FSES, 2026

15 p.

Belief Elicitation
Subjective Beliefs
Probabilistic Beliefs
Cognitive Default
Field Evidence
English Subjective beliefs are central to economic inference, and incentive-compatible belief elicitation mechanisms are widely assumed to identify these latent objects. This paper shows that elicited belief reports causally depend on an uninformative cognitive default induced by the elicitation design. From the lab to sports betting to official inflation expectations, reported beliefs are highly malleable, even under theoretically and behaviorally compatible incentives. I propose experimentally varying the cognitive default during belief elicitation. This exogenous variation allows the construction of inferred beliefs that are stable across elicitation designs and empirically outperform incentivized reports in predicting realized outcomes and participants’ own behavior.
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Faculty
Faculté des sciences économiques et sociales et du management
Language
  • English
Classification
Economics
Series statement
  • Working Papers SES ; 544
License
CC BY-NC
Identifiers
Persistent URL
https://folia.unifr.ch/unifr/documents/334237
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