Putting Peer Prediction Under the Micro(economic)scope and Making Truth-telling Focal

Understand

Peer-prediction is a (meta-)mechanism which, given any proper scoring rule, produces a mechanism to elicit privately-held, non-verifiable information from self-interested agents.

• Formally, truth-telling is a strict Nash equilibrium of the mechanism.
• Unfortunately, there may be other equilibria as well (including uninformative equilibria where all players simply report the same fixed signal, regardless of their true signal) and, typically, the truth-telling equilibrium does not have the highest expected payoff.
• The main result of this paper is to show that, in the symmetric binary setting, by tweaking peer-prediction, in part by carefully selecting the proper scoring rule it is based on, we can make the truth-telling equilibrium focal---that is, truth-telling has higher expected payoff than any other equilibrium.