Eliciting Truthful Answers to Multiple-Choice Questions Export

@inproceedings{citeulike:5131171, 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.}, author = {Lambert, Nicolas and Shoham, Yoav}, booktitle = {10th ACM Conference on Electronic Commerce}, citeulike-article-id = {5131171}, citeulike-linkout-0 = {http://ai.stanford.edu/~nlambert/papers/EC2009-questionnaires.pdf}, keywords = {distributions, elicitation, scoring\_rules}, posted-at = {2009-07-13 03:56:10}, priority = {5}, title = {Eliciting Truthful Answers to Multiple-Choice Questions}, url = {http://ai.stanford.edu/~nlambert/papers/EC2009-questionnaires.pdf}, year = {2009} }

TY - CONF ID - citeulike:5131171 L3 - citeulike-article-id:5131171 N2 - 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. TI - Eliciting Truthful Answers to Multiple-Choice Questions T2 - 10th ACM Conference on Electronic Commerce KW - distributions KW - elicitation KW - scoring_rules AU - Lambert, Nicolas AU - Shoham, Yoav PY - 2009/// UR - http://ai.stanford.edu/~nlambert/papers/EC2009-questionnaires.pdf ER -