Belief Elicitation under Ambiguity

Beliefs play a critical role in many economic, political, and life decisions. Hence, researchers have been interested in eliciting individuals' beliefs to better understand their decision-making processes. A fundamental challenge in experimental economics has been creating incentives for experimental participants to truthfully report their beliefs. In recent years, researchers have developed sophisticated methods to elicit the beliefs of experimental participants in an incentive-compatible manner (see Schotter and Trevino, 2014; Schlag et al., 2015; Trautmann and van de Kuilen, 2015; Charness et al., 2021, for reviews). One state-of-the-art method to elicit beliefs is the binarized scoring rule (BSR), which is incentive compatible even under non-neutral risk preferences (Hossain and Okui, 2013). To date, the discussion around the incentive compatibility of belief elicitation methods remains agnostic about the influence of ambiguity. This is surprising in light of the fact that experimenters are often interested in beliefs about ambiguous events. In this project, we investigate how reported beliefs under the BSR deviate from the implied objective probabilities for ambiguous and risky events, and how such deviations depend on the level of detail used to explain the BSR, the stake size, and participants' ambiguity preferences. Finally, we examine the extent to which reported beliefs deviate in line with theoretical predictions based on individuals' ambiguity preferences.