Abstract

We study information revelation in scoring rule and prediction market mechanisms in settings in which traders have conflicting incentives due to opportunities to profit from the market operator’s subsequent actions. In our canonical model, an agent Alice is offered an incentive-compatible scoring rule to reveal her beliefs about a future event, but can also profit from misleading another trader Bob about her information and then making money off Bob’s error in a subsequent market. We show that, in any weak Perfect Bayesian Equilibrium of this sequence of two markets, Alice and Bob earn payoffs that are consistent with a minimax strategy of a related game. We can then characterize the equilibria in terms of an information channel: the outcome of the first scoring rule is as if Alice had only observed a noisy version of her initial signal, with the degree of noise indicating the adverse effect of the second market on the first. We provide a partial constructive characterization of when this channel will be noiseless. We show that our results on the canonical model yield insights into other settings of information extraction with conflicting incentives.

Citations