Iterated Revelation: How to Incentivize Experts to Reveal Novel Actions
Theoretical Economics
2025-07-25 v3
Abstract
I examine how a decision maker can incentivize an expert to reveal novel actions, expanding the set from which he can choose, without making ex-ante commitments regarding as-of-yet unrevealed actions. The outcomes achievable by any (incentive compatible) mechanism are characterized by the iterated revelation protocol: a simple dynamic interaction where, each round, the expert reveals novel actions and the decision maker adds actions to a shortlist; when nothing novel is revealed, the mechanism ends with the expert choosing an action from the shortlist. Greedy strategies -- where the decision maker optimizes myopically -- delineate the decision maker's maximal payoff achievable by any efficient mechanism.
Keywords
Cite
@article{arxiv.2304.05142,
title = {Iterated Revelation: How to Incentivize Experts to Reveal Novel Actions},
author = {Evan Piermont},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2304.05142},
year = {2025}
}