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Obtaining costly unverifiable valuations from a single agent

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Abstract

A principal needs to elicit the true value of an object she owns from an agent who has a unique ability to compute this information. The principal cannot verify the correctness of the information, so she must incentivize the agent to report truthfully. Previous works coped with this unverifiability by employing two or more information agents and awarding them according to the correlation between their reports. We show that, in a common value setting, the principal can elicit the true information even from a single information agent, and even when computing the value is costly for the agent. Moreover, the principal’s expense is only slightly higher than the cost of computing the value. For this purpose we provide three alternative mechanisms, all providing the same above guarantee, highlighting the advantages and disadvantages in each. Extensions of the basic mechanism include adaptations for cases such as when the principal and the agent value the object differently, when the object is divisible and when the agent’s cost of computation is unknown. Finally, we deal with the case where delivering the information to the principal incurs a cost. Here we show that substantial savings can be obtained in a multi-object setting.

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Notes

  1. The object may have a negative value which cannot be freely disposed of. For example, a broken car takes room in the garage, and movers should be paid in order to get rid of it. Similarly, a company in debt cannot be abandoned before its debt is fully paid.

  2. By https://www.edmunds.com/car-buying/inspect-that-used-car-before-buying.html.

  3. By http://www.worthy.com/appraisal/jewelry/cost.

  4. We consider only cdfs G that are continuous and differentiable almost everywhere, so \(G'\) is well-defined almost everywhere. In points in which G is discontinuous (i.e., has a jump), \(G'\) can be defined using Dirac’s delta function.

  5. If \(\epsilon =0,\) then reporting the true v is only a weakly-dominant strategy: the agent never gains from reporting a false value, but may be indifferent between false and true value. For example, if the true value is 2 and the cdf is uniform in [3, 5] and zero elsewhere, then the agent is indifferent between reporting 1 and reporting 2, since in both cases he loses the object with probability 1. Making \(\epsilon\) even slightly above 0 prevents this indifference and makes reporting v strictly better than any other strategy.

    However, to attain this strict-truthfulness, it is sufficient to have \(\epsilon\) arbitrarily small. Hence, in the following analysis we assume for simplicity that \(\epsilon \rightarrow 0.\)

  6. If the object value is negative, then the risk for the principal is paying too much for getting rid of the object.

  7. To get an idea of the magnitude of the principal’s loss, consider a special case in which \(v_a = a\cdot v_p\) for some constant a. Suppose also, for the sake of the example, that \(v_p\) is distributed uniformly in [0, 2M]. Suppose the principal uses Mechanism 1 with the \(G_{c'}\) of (3). Then, using the expressions in the text body, we find that the principal’s loss is at most \((3/a - 2) \cdot c'.\) So when \(a=1\) the principal’s loss is exactly \(c'\) (which may be very near c), but when \(a<1\) the loss is more than \(c',\) as can be expected. It is interesting that the loss (when a is fixed) is linear function of \(c'.\) We do not know if this is true in general.

  8. Notice such saving is only possible with the delivery cost, as with the calculation cost c the agent will first need to calculate the exact value in order to determine if it is above or below the threshold.

  9. The Matlab code used is downloadable from https://tinyurl.com/rl3rnw9.

  10. When there are many agents, the problem becomes easier. For example, with three or more agents the following mechanism is possible: (a) Offer each agent to provide you the information for \(c',\) for some \(c'>c.\) (b) Collect the reports of all agreeing agents. (c) If one report is not identical to at least one other report, then file a complaint against this agent and send her to jail. This creates a coordination game where the focal point is to reveal the true value, similarly to the famous ESP game. In our setting there is a single agent, so this trick is not possible.

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Acknowledgements

The project was initiated thanks to an idea of Tomer Sharbaf, who also participated in the preliminary version of this paper [38]. This paper benefited a lot from discussions with the participants of the industrial engineering seminar in Ariel University, the game theory seminar in Bar Ilan University, the game theory seminar in the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, the game theory seminar in the Technion, and the Israeli artificial intelligence day. We are particularly grateful to Igal Milchtaich and Sergiu Hart for their helpful mathematical ideas. We are also grateful to the anonymous reviewers of AAMAS for their helpful comments. This research was partially supported by the Israel Science Foundation (Grant No. 1162/17).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Ariel University, 40700, Ariel, Israel

    Erel Segal-Halevi & Shani Alkoby

  2. Bar-Ilan University, 52900, Ramat Gan, Israel

    David Sarne

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  1. Erel Segal-Halevi
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Correspondence to Erel Segal-Halevi.

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A preliminary version appeared in the proceedings of AAMAS 2019. We are grateful to Tomer Sharbaf for participating in the preliminary version [38]. New in this version are: (a) handling objects that may have both a positive and a negative value. (b) handling the case where besides the information computation cost, the agent incurs an information delivery cost (Sect. 9), and therefore, the principal may want to elicit the true value only when it is above a certain threshold. (c) extending the section on different values (Sect. 6) by reducing the problem of minimizing the principal’s expense subject to revealing the true value into a substantially simpler form. (d) Adding examples based on real value data (Sect. 3) and simulations (Sect. 9).

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Segal-Halevi, E., Alkoby, S. & Sarne, D. Obtaining costly unverifiable valuations from a single agent. Auton Agent Multi-Agent Syst 34, 46 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10458-020-09469-4

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