TY  - JOUR
AU  - Augenblick,Ned
AU  - Cunha,Jesse M.
AU  - Bó,Ernesto Dal
AU  - Rao,Justin M.
TI  - The Economics of Faith: Using an Apocalyptic Prophecy to Elicit Religious Beliefs in the Field
JF  - National Bureau of Economic Research Working Paper Series
VL  - No. 18641
PY  - 2012
Y2  - December 2012
UR  - http://www.nber.org/papers/w18641
L1  - http://www.nber.org/papers/w18641.pdf
N1  - Author contact info:
Ned Augenblick
Haas School of Business - EAP Group
545 Student Services Building, 1900
Berkeley, CA 94720-1900
Tel: 650-804-5281
E-Mail: ned@haas.berkeley.edu

Jesse Cunha
Naval Postgraduate School
Graduate School of Business
and Public Policy
555 Dyer Rd
Monterey, CA 93943
Tel: 650.492.0381
E-Mail: jcunha@nps.edu

Ernesto Dal Bó
University of California, Berkeley
Haas School of Business
545 Student Services Building #1900
Berkeley, CA 94720-1900
Tel: 510 643 1606
E-Mail: dalbo@haas.berkeley.edu

Justin Rao
Microsoft Research New York City
E-Mail: justinra@microsoft.com
AB  - We model religious faith as a "demand for beliefs," following the logic of the Pascalian wager. We then demonstrate how an experimental intervention can exploit standard elicitation techniques to measure religious belief by varying prizes associated with making choices contrary to one's belief in a, crucially, falsifiable religious proposition. We implemented this approach with a group that expected the "End of the World" to happen on May 21, 2011 by offering prizes payable before and after May 21st. The results suggest the existence of a demand for extreme, sincere beliefs that was unresponsive to experimental manipulations in price.
ER  -