Well, what if the cost if one is wrong is small enough to not be a large loss, and there is a reward if one is right to account for the risk? Suppose you want

Well, what if the cost if one is wrong is small enough to not be a large loss, and there is a reward if one is right to account for the risk? Suppose you want to incentivize people to report if they are at least 5% confident that there is a problem. If you choose some small cost (say, $5 for example) if one is wrong, then if you assign a reward which is at least 19 times the cost if one is wrong, then the expected monetary value of reporting (in addition to the benefit from/of being altruistic) is positive when one is at least 5% confident that there is a problem. (The ratio, where p is the minimum level of confidence you want people to report if they have, between the cost and reward, is (1-p)/p .) One might question whether creating a monetary incentive scheme like this would still cause problems (akin to the expiraments about kids being monetarily rewarded for quality of artwork in schools decreases motivation or something like that), and that does seem like something that could be the case, But one can set up a system that doesn't just disincentivize reporting when one has any doubt (as a simple fine for false reports would do), but still disince tivizes sufficiently uncertain reports. That doesn't mean it would be a good idea though. I don't know if it would be.