Incentive-compatible functions that reward forecasters most when they report their true beliefs honestly.
Cluster: Mechanism Design
Incentive-compatible functions that reward forecasters most when they report their true beliefs honestly.
Referenced in 6 articles
Analyzes Trepa's high-frequency forecasting contest on Solana and shows its current design (median error cutoff, steep accuracy weights) induces a Keynesian beauty contest equilibrium that underweights private information. Introduces the orthogonal precision multiplier, a mechanism that rewards accurate forecasts decorrelated from the consensus, transforming Trepa into a tunable second-order oracle. Proves equilibrium existence via potential game theory, quantifies information gain through mutual information, and addresses practical vulnerabilities including oracle latency, median instability, and collusion.
Explains the SKC (Srinivasan, Karger, Chen) mechanism for prediction markets on unverifiable outcomes. Markets resolve using crowd consensus as the outcome, with delta-based scoring rewarding participants for moving markets toward final consensus. Enables markets for subjective questions lacking ground truth.
Educational thread on the game-theoretic foundations of prediction markets. Explains why truth-telling is the dominant strategy through incentive compatibility, details how LMSR works as a proper scoring rule, and argues prediction market builders need economists and game theory experts on their teams.
Academic survey of prediction mechanism design from a mechanism design perspective. Covers scoring rules, market scoring rules (LMSR), cost-function-based market makers, dynamic parimutuel markets, incentive compatibility, combinatorial markets, and peer prediction systems for subjective events where ground truth doesn't exist.
Proposes a mechanism for prediction markets where outcomes cannot be objectively verified. Uses the last reporter's prediction as a reference point, creating incentives for truthful reporting through negative cross-entropy payments. Proves truthful reporting is a perfect Bayesian equilibrium.
Investigates combinatorial prediction markets, which extend the standard model to support forecasts on conditional events (e.g., A given B) and Boolean combinations of events rather than only base events. Reports experimental results comparing combinatorial versus flat market structures on forecasting accuracy and calibration. Co-authored by Robin Hanson, whose LMSR underpins most automated prediction markets.