To formally evaluate how investors trade off financial returns and non-pecuniary motives in socially responsible investment (SRI) decisions, we need a reliable measure of return expectations. This study elicits beliefs about sustainable asset performance in a field survey experiment. We show that unincentivized Likert-scale belief measures fail to predict allocation decisions, while return expectations based on two formal incentivized methods are positively influenced by sustainability labels and meaningfully correlate with investment choices. Our findings highlight the importance of proper belief elicitation in understanding SRI motives and caution regulators and institutions against relying solely on survey responses to infer investor preferences in contexts involving non-pecuniary considerations.
