TY - GEN
T1 - Trick or treat
T2 - 15th ACM Conference on Economics and Computation, EC 2014
AU - Gao, Xi Alice
AU - Mao, Andrew
AU - Chen, Yiling
AU - Adams, Ryan Prescott
N1 - Copyright:
Copyright 2014 Elsevier B.V., All rights reserved.
PY - 2014
Y1 - 2014
N2 - Collecting truthful subjective information from multiple individuals is an important problem in many social and online systems. While peer prediction mechanisms promise to elicit truthful information by rewarding participants with carefully constructed payments, they also admit uninformative equilibria where coordinating participants provide no useful information. To understand how participants behave towards such mechanisms in practice, we conduct the first controlled online experiment of a peer prediction mechanism, engaging the participants in a multiplayer, real-time and repeated game. Using a hidden Markov model to capture players' strategies from their actions, our results show that participants successfully coordinate on uninformative equilibria and the truthful equilibrium is not focal, even when some uninformative equilibria do not exist or are undesirable. In contrast, most players are consistently truthful in the absence of peer prediction, suggesting that these mechanisms may be harmful when truthful reporting has similar cost to strategic behavior.
AB - Collecting truthful subjective information from multiple individuals is an important problem in many social and online systems. While peer prediction mechanisms promise to elicit truthful information by rewarding participants with carefully constructed payments, they also admit uninformative equilibria where coordinating participants provide no useful information. To understand how participants behave towards such mechanisms in practice, we conduct the first controlled online experiment of a peer prediction mechanism, engaging the participants in a multiplayer, real-time and repeated game. Using a hidden Markov model to capture players' strategies from their actions, our results show that participants successfully coordinate on uninformative equilibria and the truthful equilibrium is not focal, even when some uninformative equilibria do not exist or are undesirable. In contrast, most players are consistently truthful in the absence of peer prediction, suggesting that these mechanisms may be harmful when truthful reporting has similar cost to strategic behavior.
KW - hidden markov models
KW - online behavioral experiment
KW - peer prediction
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=84903137143&partnerID=8YFLogxK
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/citedby.url?scp=84903137143&partnerID=8YFLogxK
U2 - 10.1145/2600057.2602865
DO - 10.1145/2600057.2602865
M3 - Conference contribution
AN - SCOPUS:84903137143
SN - 9781450325653
T3 - EC 2014 - Proceedings of the 15th ACM Conference on Economics and Computation
SP - 507
EP - 524
BT - EC 2014 - Proceedings of the 15th ACM Conference on Economics and Computation
PB - Association for Computing Machinery
Y2 - 8 June 2014 through 12 June 2014
ER -