Obtaining Costly Unverifiable Valuations from a Single Agent

We consider the problem of a principal who needs to elicit the true worth of an object she owns from an agent who has a unique ability to compute this information. The correctness of the information cannot be verified by the principal, so it is important to incentivize the agent to report truthfully. Previous works coped with this unverifiability by employing two or more information agents and awarding them according to the correlation between their reports. In this paper we show that even with only one information agent truthful information can be elicited, as long as the object is valuable for the agent too. In particular the paper introduces a mechanism that, under mild realistic assumptions, is proved to elicit the information truthfully, even when computing the information is costly for the agent. Moreover, using this mechanism, the principal obtains the truthful information incurring an arbitrarily small expense beyond whatever unavoidable costs the setting dictates.Comment: Full version of paper accepted to AAMAS 2019. Previous title: "Making an Appraiser Work for You

Agent-Mediated Electronic Commerce. Designing Trading Strategies and Mechanisms for Electronic Markets [electronic resource] : AMEC/TADA 2015, Istanbul, Turkey, May 4, 2015, and AMEC/TADA 2016, New York, NY, USA, July 10, 2016, Revised Selected Papers /

This book constitutes revised selected papers from the 17th and 18th International Workshop on Agent-Mediated Electronic Commerce, AMEC TADA 2015 and 2016, which took place in Istanbul, Turkey, in May 2015, and in New York City, USA, in July 2016. The 10 papers presented in this volume were carefully reviewed and selected for inclusion in the book. Both workshops aim to present a cross-section of the state of the art in automated electronic markets and encourage theoretical and empirical work that deals with both the individual agent level as well as the system level. Given the breadth of research topics in this field, the range of topics addressed in these papers is correspondingly broad. They range from papers that study theoretical issues, related to the design of interaction protocols and marketplaces, to the design and analysis of automated trading strategies used by individual agents - which are often developed as part of an entry to one of the tracks of the Trading Agents Competition. .Strategic Free Information Disclosure for a Vickrey Auction -- On Revenue-Maximizing Walrasian Equilibria for Multi-Minded Bidders -- Extending Parking Lots with Electricity Trading Agent Functionalities -- Auction Based Mechanisms for Dynamic Task Assignments in Expert Crowdsourcing -- An Effective Broker for the Power TAC 2014 -- Now, Later, or Both: a Closed-Form Optimal Decision for a Risk-Averse Buyer -- Investigation of Learning Strategies for the SPOT Broker in Power TAC -- On the Use of Off-the-Shelf Machine Learning Techniques to Predict Energy Demands of Power TAC Consumers -- A Genetic Algorithmic Approach to Automated Auction Mechanism Design -- AgentUDE: The Success Story of the Power TAC 2014’s Champion. .This book constitutes revised selected papers from the 17th and 18th International Workshop on Agent-Mediated Electronic Commerce, AMEC TADA 2015 and 2016, which took place in Istanbul, Turkey, in May 2015, and in New York City, USA, in July 2016. The 10 papers presented in this volume were carefully reviewed and selected for inclusion in the book. Both workshops aim to present a cross-section of the state of the art in automated electronic markets and encourage theoretical and empirical work that deals with both the individual agent level as well as the system level. Given the breadth of research topics in this field, the range of topics addressed in these papers is correspondingly broad. They range from papers that study theoretical issues, related to the design of interaction protocols and marketplaces, to the design and analysis of automated trading strategies used by individual agents - which are often developed as part of an entry to one of the tracks of the Trading Agents Competition.