Evaluating Strategic Forecasters

Rahul Deb, Mallesh Pai and Maher Said

Working Papers from University of Toronto, Department of Economics

Abstract: Motivated by the question of how one should evaluate professional election forecasters, we study a novel dynamic mechanism design problem without transfers. A principal who wishes to hire only high quality forecasters is faced with an agent of unknown quality. The agent privately observes signals about a publicly observable future event, and may strategically misrepresent information to inflate the principal's perception of his quality. We show that the optimal deterministic mechanism is simple and easy to implement in practice: it evaluates a single, optimally timed prediction. We study the generality of this result and its robustness to randomization and noncommitment.

Keywords: dynamic mechanism design; mechanism design without transfers; forecasting; learning; election predictions. (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D82 D83 D86 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: Unknown pages
Date: 2017-02-20
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-mic
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https://www.economics.utoronto.ca/public/workingPapers/tecipa-578.pdf Main Text (application/pdf)

Related works:
Journal Article: Evaluating Strategic Forecasters (2018)
Working Paper: Evaluating Strategic Forecasters (2018)
Working Paper: Evaluating Strategic Forecasters (2017)
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