Papers

We consider mechanisms for truthfully eliciting probabilistic predictions from a group of experts. The standard approach -- using a proper scoring rule to separately reward each expert -- is not robust to collusion: experts may collude to misreport their beliefs in a way that guarantees them a larger total reward no matter the eventual outcome. Chun and Shachter (2011) termed any such collusion "arbitrage" and asked whether there is any truthful elicitation mechanism that makes arbitrage impossible. We resolve this question positively, exhibiting a class of strictly proper arbitrage-free contract functions. These contract functions have two parts: one ensures that the total reward of a coalition of experts depends only on the average of their reports; the other ensures that changing this average report hurts the experts under at least one outcome.

poster session 5 @ blue 6, poster session 8 @ blue 6, oral session 5 @ blue 6, poster session 5, poster session 8, oral session 5

We study a dynamic model of Bayesian persuasion in sequential decision-making settings. An informed principal observes an external parameter of the world and advises an uninformed agent about actions to take over time. The agent takes actions in each time step based on the current state, the principal's advice/signal, and beliefs about the external parameter. The action of the agent updates the state according to a stochastic process. The model arises naturally in many applications, e.g., an app (the principal) can advice the user (the agent) on possible choices between actions based on additional real-time information the app has. We study the problem of designing a signaling strategy from the principal's point of view. We show that the principal has an optimal strategy against a myopic agent, who only optimizes their rewards locally, and the optimal strategy can be computed in polynomial time. In contrast, it is NP-hard to approximate an optimal policy against a far-sighted agent. Further, we show that if the principal has the power to threaten the agent by not providing future signals, then we can efficiently design a threat-based strategy. This strategy guarantees the principal's payoff as if playing against an agent who is far-sighted but myopic to future signals.

poster session 5 @ blue 6, poster session 8 @ blue 6, oral session 5 @ blue 6, poster session 5, poster session 8, oral session 5

We pose and study the problem of planning in Markov decision processes (MDPs), subject to participation constraints as studied in mechanism design. In this problem, a planner must work with a self-interested agent on a given MDP. Each action in the MDP provides an immediate reward to the planner and a (possibly different) reward to the agent. The agent has no control in choosing the actions, but has the option to end the entire process at any time. The goal of the planner is to find a policy that maximizes her cumulative reward, taking into consideration the agent's ability to terminate. Our main result is a fully polynomial-time approximation scheme for this problem. En route, we present polynomial-time algorithms for computing (exact) optimal policies for important special cases of this problem, including when the time horizon is constant, or when the MDP exhibits a "definitive decisions" property. We illustrate our algorithms with two different game-theoretic applications: the problem of assigning rides in ride-sharing and the problem of designing screening policies. Our results imply efficient algorithms for computing (approximately) optimal policies in both these applications.

poster session 5 @ blue 6, poster session 8 @ blue 6, oral session 5 @ blue 6, poster session 5, poster session 8, oral session 5