Predicting new product adoption using Bayesian truth serum

Howie, Patrick J.; Wang, Ying; Tsai, Joanne

doi:10.1057/jmm.2010.19

Cited by 9 publications

(11 citation statements)

References 8 publications

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“…For example, John et al (2012) successfully used it to incentivize social psychologist to admit to questionable research practices, while Weaver and Prelec (2013) demonstrated the BTS to yield significantly more honest responses in a general knowledge questionnaire than the control group even when coupled with a mechanism encouraging overreporting one's knowledge. The BTS has been utilized in studies of optimal incentives for inexpert human raters (Shaw et al 2011), informing policy (Weiss 2009) as well as ex ante analysis of new drug adoption (Howie et al 2011).…”

Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Digital piracy and the perception of price fairness: evidence from a field experiment

2020

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We study a relationship between perceived price fairness and digital piracy. In a large-scale field experiment on customers of a leading ebook store, we employ the Bayesian truth serum to elicit the information on acquiring books from unauthorized sources (often referred to as digital piracy). We provide empirical evidence in support of the conjecture that willingness to "pirate" is associated with having experienced subjective overpricing. We propose and verify the relevance of two mechanisms behind this link: reactance theory and moral cleansing/licensing. The results indicate that pricing policy perceived as fair may reduce the scope for digital piracy.

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Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Digital piracy and the perception of price fairness: evidence from a field experiment

2020

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“…It is designed to reward honesty of responders in survey designs where the subject matter is subjective and cannot be compared against an objective baseline. It has been used in predicting new product adoption (Howie et al 2011), in perceptual deterrence studies in criminological research (Loughran et al 2014), in eliciting expert beliefs about future energy prices (Zhou et al 2019), and in estimating the prevalence of questionable research practices in psychology (John et al 2012). In all of these cases, participants could not be standardly incentivised to provide true answers due to the nature of the questions being subjective or not straightforwardly verifiable in a relevant time frame.…”

Section: Incentive Compatible Mechanism Design and The Bayesian Truth Serummentioning

confidence: 99%

Experimental Philosophy and the Incentivisation Challenge: a Proposed Application of the Bayesian Truth Serum

Schönegger

2021

Rev.Phil.Psych.

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A key challenge in experimental social science research is the incentivisation of subjects such that they take the tasks presented to them seriously and answer honestly. If subject responses can be evaluated against an objective baseline, a standard way of incentivising participants is by rewarding them monetarily as a function of their performance. However, the subject area of experimental philosophy is such that this mode of incentivisation is not applicable as participant responses cannot easily be scored along a true-false spectrum by the experimenters. We claim that experimental philosophers’ neglect of and claims of unimportance about incentivisation mechanisms in their surveys and experiments has plausibly led to poorer data quality and worse conclusions drawn overall, potentially threatening the research programme of experimental philosophy in the long run. As a solution to this, we propose the adoption of the Bayesian Truth Serum, an incentive-compatible mechanism used in economics and marketing, designed for eliciting honest responding in subjective data designs by rewarding participant answers that are surprisingly common. We argue that the Bayesian Truth Serum (i) adequately addresses the issue of incentive compatibility in subjective data research designs and (ii) that it should be applied to the vast majority of research in experimental philosophy. Further, we (iii) provide an empirical application of the method, demonstrating its qualified impact on the distribution of answers on a number of standard experimental philosophy items and outline guidance for researchers aiming to apply this mechanism in future research by specifying the additional costs and design steps involved.

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“…We say that the BTS mechanism results in logarithmic scoring. BTS has been successfully applied in various fields, including new product adoption [12], economics and psychology [15], knowledge design [20], and criminology [17].…”

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confidence: 99%

“…A response a π would typically include a declaration of a respondent's type (choosing an answer to a multiple-choice question) and it would also include responses to some other questions in order to be truth-inducing. 12 It could also include a declaration of the respondent's prior distribution of types and states of nature, as introduced below; that is, the respondent could be asked to state his prior. We posit the following.…”

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confidence: 99%

Incentive-Compatible Surveys via Posterior Probabilities

Cvitanić¹,

Prelec²,

Radas³

et al. 2020

Theory Probab. Appl.

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We consider the problem of eliciting truthful responses to a survey question when the respondents share a common prior that the survey planner is agnostic about. The planner would therefore like to have a "universal" mechanism, which would induce honest answers for all possible priors. If the planner also requires a locality condition that ensures that the mechanism payoffs are determined by the respondents' posterior probabilities of the true state of nature, we prove that, under additional smoothness and sensitivity conditions, the payoff in the truth-telling equilibrium must be a logarithmic function of those posterior probabilities. Moreover, the respondents are necessarily ranked according to those probabilities. Finally, we discuss implementation issues.

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Predicting new product adoption using Bayesian truth serum

Cited by 9 publications

References 8 publications

Digital piracy and the perception of price fairness: evidence from a field experiment

Digital piracy and the perception of price fairness: evidence from a field experiment

Experimental Philosophy and the Incentivisation Challenge: a Proposed Application of the Bayesian Truth Serum

Incentive-Compatible Surveys via Posterior Probabilities

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