ScholarlyCommons

Title

Conducting Truthful Surveys, Cheaply

Author(s)

Aaron Roth, University of PennsylvaniaFollow
Grant Schoenebeck, Princeton University

Date of this Version

3-2-2012

Document Type

Conference Paper

Recommended Citation

Aaron Roth and Grant Schoenebeck, "Conducting Truthful Surveys, Cheaply", . March 2012.

Comments

Aaron Roth and Grant Schoenebeck. 2012. Conducting truthful surveys, cheaply. In Proceedings of the 13th ACM Conference on Electronic Commerce (EC '12). ACM, New York, NY, USA, 826-843. DOI=10.1145/2229012.2229076 http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/2229012.2229076

© ACM, 2012. This is the author's version of the work. It is posted here by permission of ACM for your personal use. Not for redistribution. The definitive version was published in Proceedings of the 13th ACM Conference on Electronic Commerce, {(2012)} http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/2229012.2229076" Email permissions@acm.org

Abstract

We consider the problem of conducting a survey with the goal of obtaining an unbiased estimator of some population statistic when individuals have unknown costs (drawn from a known prior) for participating in the survey. Individuals must be compensated for their participation and are strategic agents, and so the payment scheme must incentivize truthful behavior. We derive optimal truthful mechanisms for this problem for the two goals of minimizing the variance of the estimator given a fixed budget, and minimizing the expected cost of the survey given a fixed variance goal.