Three of Pitt's economics faculty have authored the lead article in the September 2022 issue of American Economic Review. “Belief Elicitation and Behavioral Incentive Compatibility," by David Danz, Lise Vesterlund, and Alistair Wilson, is representative of not only the department's scholarly output but also its culture of collaboration.
The abstract reads:
Subjective beliefs are crucial for economic inference, yet behavior can challenge the elicitation. We propose that belief elicitation should be incentive compatible not only theoretically but also in a de facto behavioral sense. To demonstrate, we show that the binarized scoring rule, a state-of-the-art elicitation, violates two weak conditions for behavioral incentive compatibility: (i) within the elicitation, information on the incentives increases deviations from truthful reporting; and (ii) in a pure choice over the set of incentives, most deviate from the theorized maximizer. Moreover, we document that deviations are systematic and center-biased, and that the elicited beliefs substantially distort inference.