Incentives for expressing opinions in online polls

ABSTRACT

Prediction markets efficiently extract and aggregate the private information held by individuals about events and facts that can be publicly verified. However, facts such as the effects of raising or lowering interest rates can never be publicly verified, since only one option will be implemented. Online opinion polls can still be used to extract and aggregate private information about such questions. This paper addresses incentives for truthful reporting in online opinion polls. The challenge lies in designing reward schemes that do not require a-priori knowledge of the participants' beliefs. We survey existing solutions, analyze their practicality and propose a new mechanism that extracts accurate information from rational participants.

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INDEX TERMS

Primary Classification:
  I. Computing Methodologies
  I.2 ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE
        I.2.11 Distributed Artificial Intelligence

General Terms:
Algorithms, Design, Economics

Keywords:
incentive compatibility, mechanism design, opinion polls