IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/aea/aecrev/v108y2018i10p3057-3103.html

Evaluating Strategic Forecasters

Author

Listed:
  • Rahul Deb
  • Mallesh M. Pai
  • Maher Said

Abstract

Motivated by the question of how one should evaluate professional election forecasters, we study a novel dynamic mechanism design problem without transfers. A principal who wishes to hire only high-quality forecasters is faced with an agent of unknown quality. The agent privately observes signals about a publicly observable future event, and may strategically misrepresent information to inflate the principal's perception of his quality. We show that the optimal deterministic mechanism is simple and easy to implement in practice: it evaluates a single, optimally timed prediction. We study the generality of this result and its robustness to randomization and noncommitment.

Suggested Citation

  • Rahul Deb & Mallesh M. Pai & Maher Said, 2018. "Evaluating Strategic Forecasters," American Economic Review, American Economic Association, vol. 108(10), pages 3057-3103, October.
    • Handle: RePEc:aea:aecrev:v:108:y:2018:i:10:p:3057-3103
    Note: DOI: 10.1257/aer.20170299
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://www.aeaweb.org/doi/10.1257/aer.20170299
    Download Restriction: no
    File URL: https://www.aeaweb.org/articles/attachments?retrieve=ix3Dzube-pLxysuPmCgMqM-QuBne6tF7
    Download Restriction: no
    File URL: https://www.aeaweb.org/articles/attachments?retrieve=wHC0TzmPHMo5qKkpqUAJkPL69a_BcMRN
    Download Restriction: Access to full text is restricted to AEA members and institutional subscribers.
    ---><---

    Other versions of this item:

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Cipullo, Davide & Reslow, André, 2019. "Biased Forecasts to Affect Voting Decisions? The Brexit Case," Working Paper Series 364, Sveriges Riksbank (Central Bank of Sweden).
    2. Aleksei Smirnov & Egor Starkov, 2019. "Timing of predictions in dynamic cheap talk: experts vs. quacks," ECON - Working Papers 334, Department of Economics - University of Zurich.
    3. Dirk Bergemann & Tan Gan & Yingkai Li, 2023. "Managing Persuasion Robustly: The Optimality of Quota Rules," Papers 2310.10024, arXiv.org, revised Dec 2025.
    4. Yingkai Li & Jonathan Libgober, 2023. "Incentivizing Forecasters to Learn: Summarized vs. Unrestricted Advice," Papers 2310.19147, arXiv.org, revised Dec 2025.
    5. Andrew Gelman & Jessica Hullman & Christopher Wlezien & George Elliott Morris, 2020. "Information, incentives, and goals in election forecasts," Judgment and Decision Making, Society for Judgment and Decision Making, vol. 15(5), pages 863-880, September.
    6. Deb, Rahul & Mitchell, Matthew & Pai, Mallesh M., 2022. "(Bad) reputation in relational contracting," Theoretical Economics, Econometric Society, vol. 17(2), May.
    7. Lukyanov, Georgy, 2023. "Reputation for competence in a cheap-talk setting," Research in Economics, Elsevier, vol. 77(3), pages 285-294.
    8. Rajiv Vohra & Francisco Espinosa & Debraj Ray, 2021. "A Principal-Agent Relationship with No Advantage to Commitment," Working Papers 2021-003, Brown University, Department of Economics.
    9. Rahul Deb & Matthew Mitchell & Mallesh Pai, 2019. "Our distrust is very expensive," Working Papers tecipa-632, University of Toronto, Department of Economics.
    10. Fan Wu, 2024. "Incentivizing Information Acquisition," Papers 2410.13978, arXiv.org, revised Feb 2025.
    11. Dell’Era, Michele, 2020. "Talking to influence," Economics Letters, Elsevier, vol. 192(C).

    More about this item

    JEL classification:

    • C53 - Mathematical and Quantitative Methods - - Econometric Modeling - - - Forecasting and Prediction Models; Simulation Methods
    • D72 - Microeconomics - - Analysis of Collective Decision-Making - - - Political Processes: Rent-seeking, Lobbying, Elections, Legislatures, and Voting Behavior
    • D82 - Microeconomics - - Information, Knowledge, and Uncertainty - - - Asymmetric and Private Information; Mechanism Design

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:aea:aecrev:v:108:y:2018:i:10:p:3057-3103. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Michael P. Albert (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/aeaaaea.html .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.