Accurately eliciting people’s preferences and beliefs is a central focus of social science research. Without incentives for accuracy, respondents may answer inattentively and compromise on accuracy. But conventional incentive schemes cannot be used to incentivize hypothetical or subjective questions.
Joint with Evan Friedman and Duncan Webb
We introduce the “recall method”, which incentivizes survey choices by telling respondents that they will be given a randomly selected subset of the questions they had previously answered at the end of the survey and paid to restate their answers correctly. If answers are easier to restate when they are carefully thought-out and truthful, then participants will have an incentive to respond more truthfully.
We run a Prolific experiment to test this hypothesis. Our results suggest that the method can increase respondents’ internal consistency without compromising accuracy. We benchmark the effects against other payment schemes, including conventional incentives and a gift exchange treatment.
About the speaker
Suanna’s work is 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. Her first two papers have been conditionally accepted for publication at the AER and the QJE.
Registration
If you would like to schedule a bilateral, join lunch or dinner on Friday evening, please send an email to boring@ese.eur.nl.
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