Eliciting truthful answers to multiple-choice questions

Motivated by the prevalence of online questionnaires in electronic commerce, and of multiple-choice questions in such questionnaires, we consider the problem of eliciting truthful answers to multiple-choice questions from a knowledgeable respondent. Specifically, each question is a statement regarding an uncertain future event, and is multiple-choice – the responder must select exactly one of the given answers. The principal offers a payment, whose amount is a function of the answer selected and the true outcome (which the principal will eventually observe). This problem significantly generalizes recent work on truthful elicitation of distribution properties, which itself generalized a long line of work in elicitation of complete distributions. We provide necessary and sufficient conditions for the existence of payments that induce truthful answers, and give a characterization of those payments. We also study in greater details the common case of questions with ordinal answers, a...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2009
• Where: SIGECOM
• Authors: Nicolas S. Lambert, Yoav Shoham
• Keywords: Information Management, Multiple-choice Questions, SIGECOM 2009, Truthful Answers, Truthful Elicitation