5 research outputs found
Optimum Statistical Estimation with Strategic Data Sources
We propose an optimum mechanism for providing monetary incentives to the data
sources of a statistical estimator such as linear regression, so that high
quality data is provided at low cost, in the sense that the sum of payments and
estimation error is minimized. The mechanism applies to a broad range of
estimators, including linear and polynomial regression, kernel regression, and,
under some additional assumptions, ridge regression. It also generalizes to
several objectives, including minimizing estimation error subject to budget
constraints. Besides our concrete results for regression problems, we
contribute a mechanism design framework through which to design and analyze
statistical estimators whose examples are supplied by workers with cost for
labeling said examples
Learning Prices for Repeated Auctions with Strategic Buyers
Inspired by real-time ad exchanges for online display advertising, we
consider the problem of inferring a buyer's value distribution for a good when
the buyer is repeatedly interacting with a seller through a posted-price
mechanism. We model the buyer as a strategic agent, whose goal is to maximize
her long-term surplus, and we are interested in mechanisms that maximize the
seller's long-term revenue. We define the natural notion of strategic regret
--- the lost revenue as measured against a truthful (non-strategic) buyer. We
present seller algorithms that are no-(strategic)-regret when the buyer
discounts her future surplus --- i.e. the buyer prefers showing advertisements
to users sooner rather than later. We also give a lower bound on strategic
regret that increases as the buyer's discounting weakens and shows, in
particular, that any seller algorithm will suffer linear strategic regret if
there is no discounting.Comment: Neural Information Processing Systems (NIPS 2013