American Economic Review: Insights
ISSN 2640-205X (Print) | ISSN 2640-2068 (Online)
Honesty via Choice-Matching
American Economic Review: Insights
vol. 1,
no. 2, September 2019
(pp. 179–92)
Abstract
We introduce choice-matching, a class of mechanisms for eliciting honest responses to a multiple choice question (MCQ), as might appear in a market research study, opinion poll, or economics experiment. Under choice-matching, respondents are compensated through an auxiliary task, e.g., a personal consumption choice or a forecast. Their compensation depends both on their performance on the auxiliary task, and on the performance of those respondents who matched their response to the MCQ. We give conditions for such mechanisms to be strictly truth-inducing, focusing on a special case in which the auxiliary task is to predict the answers of other respondents.Citation
Cvitanić, Jakša, Dražen Prelec, Blake Riley, and Benjamin Tereick. 2019. "Honesty via Choice-Matching." American Economic Review: Insights, 1 (2): 179–92. DOI: 10.1257/aeri.20180227Additional Materials
JEL Classification
- C78 Bargaining Theory; Matching Theory
- C83 Survey Methods; Sampling Methods
- D81 Criteria for Decision-Making under Risk and Uncertainty
- D82 Asymmetric and Private Information; Mechanism Design
- D83 Search; Learning; Information and Knowledge; Communication; Belief; Unawareness