A Penny for Your Thoughts: A Survey of Methods for Eliciting Beliefs

Incentivized methods for eliciting subjective probabilities in economic experiments present the subject with risky choices or bets that encourage truthful reporting. We discuss the most prominent elicitation methods and their underlying assumptions, provide theoretical comparisons, and propose some extensions to the standard framework. In addition, we survey the empirical literature on the performance of these elicitation methods in actual experiments, considering also practical issues of implementation such as order effects, hedging, and different ways of presenting probabilities and payment schemes to experimental subjects. We end with some thoughts on the merits of using incentives for belief elicitation and some guidelines for implementation.