Robust scoring rules

Is it possible to guarantee that the mere exposure of a subject to a belief elicitation task will not affect the very same beliefs that we are trying to elicit? In this paper, we introduce mechanisms that make it simultaneously strictly dominant for the subject (a) not to acquire any information tha...

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Bibliographic Details
Published inTheoretical economics Vol. 15; no. 3; pp. 955 - 987
Main Author Tsakas, Elias
Format Journal Article
LanguageEnglish
Published New Haven, CT The Econometric Society 01.07.2020
John Wiley & Sons, Inc
Subjects
Accuracy
Beliefs
C91
Costs
D81
D82
D83
D87
Economic theory
Elicitation
Incentives
Non-invasive belief elicitation
Noninvasive belief elicitation
Population
population beliefs
posterior-separability
prior beliefs
rational inattention
Shannon entropy
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Summary:Is it possible to guarantee that the mere exposure of a subject to a belief elicitation task will not affect the very same beliefs that we are trying to elicit? In this paper, we introduce mechanisms that make it simultaneously strictly dominant for the subject (a) not to acquire any information that could potentially lead to belief updating as a response to the incentives provided by the mechanism itself, and (b) to report his beliefs truthfully. Such mechanisms are called robust scoring rules. We prove that robust scoring rules always exist under mild assumptions on the subject's costs for acquiring information. Moreover, every scoring rule can become approximately robust, in the sense that if we scale down the incentives sufficiently, we will approximate with arbitrary precision the beliefs that the subject would have held if he had not been confronted with the belief-elicitation task.
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ISSN:1555-7561
1933-6837
1555-7561
DOI:10.3982/TE3557