English

When should an expert make a prediction?

Computer Science and Game Theory 2016-05-25 v1

Abstract

We consider a setting where in a known future time, a certain continuous random variable will be realized. There is a public prediction that gradually converges to its realized value, and an expert that has access to a more accurate prediction. Our goal is to study {\em when} should the expert reveal his information, assuming that his reward is based on a logarithmic market scoring rule (i.e., his reward is proportional to the gain in log-likelihood of the realized value). Our contributions are: (1) we characterize the expert's optimal policy and show that it is threshold based. (2) we analyze the expert's asymptotic expected optimal reward and show a tight connection to the Law of the Iterated Logarithm, and (3) we give an efficient dynamic programming algorithm to compute the optimal policy.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1605.07483,
  title  = {When should an expert make a prediction?},
  author = {Amir Ban and Yossi Azar and Yishay Mansour},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1605.07483},
  year   = {2016}
}

Comments

Full version of paper to appear at EC'16 Maastricht

R2 v1 2026-06-22T14:08:21.488Z