Nondistortionary belief elicitation

Abstract: A researcher wants to ask a decision-maker about a belief related to a choice the decision-maker made; examples include eliciting confidence or cognitive uncertainty. When can the researcher provide incentives for the decision-maker to report her belief truthfully without distorting her choice? We identify necessary and sufficient conditions for nondistortionary elicitation and fully characterize all incentivizable questions in three canonical classes of problems. For these problems, we show how to elicit beliefs using variants of the Becker-DeGroot-Marschak mechanism.