Aurélien Baillon
IBD Amphi
AMU - AMSE
5-9 boulevard Maurice Bourdet
13001 Marseille
Ewen Gallic : ewen.gallic[at]univ-amu.fr
Avner Seror : avner.seror[at]univ-amu.fr
We introduce an incentive mechanism to elicit answers to binary questions that cannot be verified for accuracy. Agents choose whether to receive a costly private signal, which leads them to endorse ``yes'' or ``no'' as an answer. Then, they either buy or sell an asset, whose value is determined by the endorsement rate of ``yes'' answers. We obtain a separating equilibrium, where agents want signals and trade the asset as a function of their signal. Two experimental studies test the theoretical results. The first shows that the mechanism motivates costly information acquisition. The second demonstrates feasibility in a natural setting.