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Conducting truthful surveys, cheaply

Published: 04 June 2012 Publication History

Abstract

We consider the problem of conducting a survey with the goal of obtaining an unbiased estimator of some population statistic when individuals have unknown costs (drawn from a known prior) for participating in the survey. Individuals must be compensated for their participation and are strategic agents, and so the payment scheme must incentivize truthful behavior. We derive optimal truthful mechanisms for this problem for the two goals of minimizing the variance of the estimator given a fixed budget, and minimizing the expected cost of the survey given a fixed variance goal.

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K. Ligett and A. Roth. Take it or leave it: Running a survey when privacy comes at a cost. 2012. Manuscript.
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    cover image ACM Conferences
    EC '12: Proceedings of the 13th ACM Conference on Electronic Commerce
    June 2012
    1016 pages
    ISBN:9781450314152
    DOI:10.1145/2229012
    Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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    Publication History

    Published: 04 June 2012

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    Author Tags

    1. mechanism design
    2. privacy

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    EC '12
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    EC '12: ACM Conference on Electronic Commerce
    June 4 - 8, 2012
    Valencia, Spain

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    Overall Acceptance Rate 664 of 2,389 submissions, 28%

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