Robust scoring rules

Elias Tsakas
Additional contact information
Elias Tsakas: Microeconomics & Public Economics, RS: GSBE ETBC, RS: GSBE Theme Conflict & Cooperation, RS: GSBE Theme Human Decisions and Policy Design

No 23, Research Memorandum from Maastricht University, Graduate School of Business and Economics (GSBE)

Abstract: We study elicitation of latent (prior) beliefs when the agent can acquire information via a costly attention strategy. We introduce a mechanism that simultaneously makes it strictly dominant to (a) not acquire any information, and (b) report truthfully. We call such a mechanism a robust scoring rule. Robust scoring rules are important for different reasons. Theoretically, they are crucial both for establishing that decision-theoretic models under uncertainty are testable. From an applied point of view, they are needed for eliciting unbiased estimates of population beliefs. We prove that a robust scoring rule exists under mild axioms on the attention costs. These axioms are shown to characterize the class of posterior-separable cost functions. Our existence proof is constructive, thus identifying an entire class of robust scoring rules. Subsequently, we show that we can arbitrarily approximate the agent's prior beliefs with a quadratic scoring rule. The same holds true for a discrete scoring rule. Finally, we show that the prior beliefs can be approximated, even when we are uncertain about the exact specification of the agent's attention costs.

JEL-codes: C91 D81 D82 D83 D87 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2018-10-08
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-des, nep-gth, nep-mic and nep-ore
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
https://cris.maastrichtuniversity.nl/ws/files/29754027/RM18023.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:unm:umagsb:2018023

DOI: 10.26481/umagsb.2018023

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Research Memorandum from Maastricht University, Graduate School of Business and Economics (GSBE) Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Andrea Willems () and Leonne Portz ().