Suanna Oh, Paris School of Economics

"Psychological Mechanisms for Eliciting Preferences and Beliefs"

Abstract

We introduce, and experimentally test, two novel psychological mechanisms for improving answer quality in surveys. The “bonus method” offers additional payments mid-way through the survey, framed as a gift given in exchange for effort. The “restatement method” involves telling subjects that they will be paid for restating a randomly selected subset of the answers they previously gave at the end of the survey. The idea is that, by answering questions carefully, subjects may be better able to reconstruct their answers at a later time (without the need for memorization) and thus earn more money. A virtue of both methods is that they can be applied to arbitrary questions. This includes elicitations over “unverifiable” objects which cannot be incentivized through conventional means, e.g. beliefs about states of the world that are unobserved by the researcher or preferences over objects that cannot be “paid out.” We find that the restatement method has significant promise: relative to both treatments with no incentives and conventional incentives, the method leads to greater internal consistency without reducing the rate at which objective questions are answered correctly.

Suanna Oh is an assistant professor at the Paris School of Economics. Her works are at the intersection of development and behavioral economics. Her current projects focus on studying cultural and behavioral frictions in the labor market using field experiments.

You can read more about Suanna Oh here

CEBI contact: Florian Schneider