Related papers: Obtaining Costly Unverifiable Valuations from a Si…
A principal who values an object allocates it to one or more agents. Agents learn private information (signals) from an information designer about the allocation payoff to the principal. Monetary transfer is not available but the principal…
In many settings, an effective way of evaluating objects of interest is to collect evaluations from dispersed individuals and to aggregate these evaluations together. Some examples are categorizing online content and evaluating student…
A central question of crowd-sourcing is how to elicit expertise from agents. This is even more difficult when answers cannot be directly verified. A key challenge is that sophisticated agents may strategically withhold effort or information…
We investigate the mechanism design problem faced by a principal who hires \emph{multiple} agents to gather and report costly information. Then, the principal exploits the information to make an informed decision. We model this problem as a…
I study a principal-agent model in which a principal hires an agent to collect information about an unknown continuous state. The agent acquires a signal whose distribution is centered around the state, controlling the signal's precision at…
We consider a principal agent project selection problem with asymmetric information. There are $N$ projects and the principal must select exactly one of them. Each project provides some profit to the principal and some payoff to the agent…
Suppose you run a home exam, where students should report their own scores but can cheat freely. You can, if needed, call a limited number of students to class and verify their actual performance against their reported score. We consider…
Suppose a decision maker wants to predict weather tomorrow by eliciting and aggregating information from crowd. How can the decision maker incentivize the crowds to report their information truthfully? Many truthful peer prediction…
It is typically expected that if a mechanism is truthful, then the agents would, indeed, truthfully report their private information. But why would an agent believe that the mechanism is truthful? We wish to design truthful mechanisms,…
A principal hires an agent to acquire soft information about an unknown state. Even though neither how the agent learns nor what the agent discovers are contractible, we show the principal is unconstrained as to what information the agent…
How to optimally persuade an agent who has a private type? When elicitation is feasible, this amounts to a fairly standard principal-agent-style mechanism design problem, where the persuader employs a mechanism to first elicit the agent's…
We study how a principal should optimally choose between implementing a new policy and maintaining the status quo when information relevant for the decision is privately held by agents. Agents are strategic in revealing their information;…
In this paper, we study belief elicitation about an uncertain future event, where the reports will affect a principal's decision. We study two problems that can arise in this setting: (1) Agents may have an interest in the outcome of the…
We study what changes to an agent's decision problem increase her value for information. We prove that information becomes more valuable if and only if the agent's reduced-form payoff in her belief becomes more convex. When the…
We consider the problem of conducting a survey with the goal of obtaining an unbiased estimator of some population statistic when individuals have unknown costs (drawn from a known prior) for participating in the survey. Individuals must be…
This paper studies a dynamic model of information acquisition, in which information might be secretly manipulated. A principal must choose between a safe action with known payoff and a risky action with uncertain payoff, favoring the safe…
We introduce the study of sequential information elicitation in strategic multi-agent systems. In an information elicitation setup a center attempts to compute the value of a function based on private information (a-k-a secrets) accessible…
We formulate the problem of fake news detection using distributed fact-checkers (agents) with unknown reliability. The stream of news/statements is modeled as an independent and identically distributed binary source (to represent true and…
We consider schemes for obtaining truthful reports on a common but hidden signal from large groups of rational, self-interested agents. One example are online feedback mechanisms, where users provide observations about the quality of a…
A principal has $m$ identical objects to allocate among a group of $n$ agents. Objects are desirable and the principal's value of assigning an object to an agent is the agent's private information. The principal can verify up to $k$ agents,…