Eliciting truthful answers to multiple-choice questions

Subscribe (Full Service)


	Search: The ACM Digital Library The Guide

	Feedback

Eliciting truthful answers to multiple-choice questions

Full text

Pdf (507 KB)

Source

Electronic Commerce archive
Proceedings of the tenth ACM conference on Electronic commerce table of contents

Stanford, California, USA

SESSION: Session 4 table of contents

Pages 109-118

Year of Publication: 2009

ISBN:978-1-60558-458-4

Authors

Nicolas Lambert	Stanford University, Stanford, CA, USA
Yoav Shoham	Stanford University, Stanford, CA, USA

Sponsors

ACM: Association for Computing Machinery
SIGEcom: ACM Special Interest Group on Electronic Commerce

Publisher

ACM New York, NY, USA

Bibliometrics

Downloads (6 Weeks): 11, Downloads (12 Months): 50, Citation Count: 0

Additional Information:

abstract references index terms collaborative colleagues

Tools and Actions:	Request Permissions Review this Article Save this Article to a Binder Display Formats: BibTeX EndNote ACM Ref

DOI Bookmark:	Use this link to bookmark this Article: http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/1566374.1566391 What is a DOI?

ABSTRACT

Motivated by the prevalence of online questionnaires in electronic commerce, and of multiple-choice questions in such questionnaires, we consider the problem of eliciting truthful answers to multiple-choice questions from a knowledgeable respondent. Specifically, each question is a statement regarding an uncertain future event, and is multiple-choice -- the responder must select exactly one of the given answers. The principal offers a payment, whose amount is a function of the answer selected and the true outcome (which the principal will eventually observe). This problem significantly generalizes recent work on truthful elicitation of distribution properties, which itself generalized a long line of work in elicitation of complete distributions. We provide necessary and sufficient conditions for the existence of payments that induce truthful answers, and give a characterization of those payments. We also study in greater details the common case of questions with ordinal answers, and illustrate our results with several examples of practical interest.

REFERENCES

Note: OCR errors may be found in this Reference List extracted from the full text article. ACM has opted to expose the complete List rather than only correct and linked references.

	1	F Aurenhammer, Power diagrams: properties, algorithms and applications, SIAM Journal on Computing, v.16 n.1, p.78-96, Feb. 1987 [doi>10.1137/0216006]
	2	Franz Aurenhammer, Voronoi diagrams—a survey of a fundamental geometric data structure, ACM Computing Surveys (CSUR), v.23 n.3, p.345-405, Sept. 1991 [doi>10.1145/116873.116880]
	3	J. Cervera and J. Munoz. Proper Scoring Rules for Fractiles. Bayesian Statistics, 5:513--519, 1996.
	4	Mark de Berg , Otfried Cheong , Marc van Kreveld , Mark Overmars, Computational Geometry: Algorithms and Applications, Springer-Verlag TELOS, Santa Clara, CA, 2008
	5	I. Eremin. Theory of Linear Optimization. VSP, 2002.
	6	H. Imai, M. Iri, and K. Murota. Voronoi Diagram in the Laguerre Geometry and Its Applications. SIAM Journal on Computing, 14:93, 1985.
	7	Nicolas S. Lambert , David M. Pennock , Yoav Shoham, Eliciting properties of probability distributions, Proceedings of the 9th ACM conference on Electronic commerce, July 08-12, 2008, Chicago, Il, USA [doi>10.1145/1386790.1386813]
	8	J. Richter-Gebert, B. Sturmfels, and T. Theobald. First Steps in Tropical Geometry. Arxiv preprint math.AG/0306366, 2003.
	9	L. Savage. Elicitation of Personal Probabilities and Expectations. Journal of the American Statistical Association, 66(336):783--801, 1971.
	10	C. Smith. Personal Probability and Statistical Analysis. Journal of the Royal Statistical Society. Series A (General), 128(4):469--499, 1965.
	11	R. Winkler, J. Munoz, J. Cervera, J. Bernardo, G. Blattenberger, J. Kadane, D. Lindley, A. Murphy, R. Oliver, and D. Rios-Insua. Scoring Rules and the Evaluation of Probabilities. TEST, 5(1):1--60, 1996.