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Related papers: Incentivizing Information Acquisition

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We examine receiver-optimal mechanisms for aggregating information divided across many biased senders. Each sender privately observes an unconditionally independent signal about an unknown state, so no sender can verify another's report. A…

Theoretical Economics · Economics 2025-08-05 James Best , Daniel Quigley , Maryam Saeedi , Ali Shourideh

We consider a model where an agent has a repeated decision to make and wishes to maximize their total payoff. Payoffs are influenced by an action taken by the agent, but also an unknown state of the world that evolves over time. Before…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2021-01-20 Nicole Immorlica , Ian Kash , Brendan Lucier

Recently, Frazier et al. proposed a natural model for crowdsourced exploration of different a priori unknown options: a principal is interested in the long-term welfare of a population of agents who arrive one by one in a multi-armed bandit…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2015-12-29 Li Han , David Kempe , Ruixin Qiang

I study the optimal provision of information in a long-term relationship between a sender and a receiver. The sender observes a persistent, evolving state and commits to send signals over time to the receiver, who sequentially chooses…

Theoretical Economics · Economics 2023-03-20 Ian Ball

We study how to optimally design selection mechanisms, accounting for agents' investment incentives. A principal wishes to allocate a resource of homogeneous quality to a heterogeneous population of agents. The principal commits to a…

Theoretical Economics · Economics 2025-11-11 Victor Augias , Eduardo Perez-Richet

An agent has access to multiple information sources, each of which provides information about a different attribute of an unknown state. Information is acquired continuously -- where the agent chooses both which sources to sample from, and…

Theoretical Economics · Economics 2021-04-27 Annie Liang , Xiaosheng Mu , Vasilis Syrgkanis

We consider the mechanism design problem of a principal allocating a single good to one of several agents without monetary transfers. Each agent desires the good and uses it to create value for the principal. We designate this value as the…

Theoretical Economics · Economics 2024-06-26 Halil İbrahim Bayrak , Çağıl Koçyiğit , Daniel Kuhn , Mustafa Çelebi Pınar

We propose and design recommendation systems that incentivize efficient exploration. Agents arrive sequentially, choose actions and receive rewards, drawn from fixed but unknown action-specific distributions. The recommendation system…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2026-04-02 Nicole Immorlica , Jieming Mao , Aleksandrs Slivkins , Zhiwei Steven Wu

An agent acquires information dynamically until her belief about a binary state reaches an upper or lower threshold. She can choose any signal process subject to a constraint on the rate of entropy reduction. Strategies are ordered by "time…

Theoretical Economics · Economics 2024-08-23 Daniel Chen , Weijie Zhong

We study the design of information acquisition games-environments where a designer contracts their action on Sender's choice of experiment and the realized signals about some state-and identify which predictions can be made absent knowledge…

Theoretical Economics · Economics 2026-01-22 Eric Gao , Daniel Luo

We characterize the optimal reward functions (scoring rules) that incentivize an agent to acquire information and report it truthfully to the principal. The optimal scoring rules let the agent make a simple binary bet in single-dimensional…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2025-10-03 Jason D. Hartline , Yingkai Li , Liren Shan , Yifan Wu

We consider sequential search by an agent who cannot observe the quality of goods but can acquire information by buying signals from a profit-maximizing principal with limited commitment power. The principal can charge higher prices for…

Theoretical Economics · Economics 2024-08-13 Teddy Mekonnen , Zeky Murra-Anton , Bobak Pakzad-Hurson

This paper studies a dynamic screening model in which a principal hires an agent with limited liability. The agent's private cost of working is an i.i.d. draw from a continuous distribution. His working status is publicly observable. The…

Theoretical Economics · Economics 2025-11-26 Yijun Liu

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…

Theoretical Economics · Economics 2025-04-15 Sumit Goel , Wade Hann-Caruthers

We introduce a stochastic principal-agent model. A principal and an agent interact in a stochastic environment, each privy to observations about the state not available to the other. The principal has the power of commitment, both to elicit…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2024-09-13 Jiarui Gan , Rupak Majumdar , Debmalya Mandal , Goran Radanovic

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…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2023-03-01 Manuel Wuthrich , Mark York , David C. Parkes

We present a model of a forecaster who must predict the future value of a variable that depends on an exogenous state and on the intervention of a policy-maker. We investigate the incentives of the forecaster to acquire costly private…

Theoretical Economics · Economics 2026-04-02 Augusto Nieto-Barthaburu

In practice, incentive providers (i.e., principals) often cannot observe the reward realizations of incentivized agents, which is in contrast to many principal-agent models that have been previously studied. This information asymmetry…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-08-15 Ilgin Dogan , Zuo-Jun Max Shen , Anil Aswani

A forward-looking agent observes signals of a state that follows a Gaussian AR(1) process. He balances the cost of having imprecise beliefs with the cost of acquiring more precise signals. I characterize his optimal information acquisition…

Theoretical Economics · Economics 2026-04-29 Benjamin Davies

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…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2016-06-23 Alice Gao , James R. Wright , Kevin Leyton-Brown