CAREER: Structure and Incentives for Eliciting and Aggregating Information

NSF Award Search · 01002627DB NSF RESEARCH & RELATED ACTIVIT · $743,315 · view on nsf.gov ↗

Abstract

People, organizations, and automated systems all need to base their decisions on information. But good information is often broadly distributed, expensive to obtain, and difficult to piece together. This project lays out the theoretical foundations for this problem and how to solve it. First, it will study how to evaluate quality, correctness, and economic value of information. This part also studies the design of loss functions in machine learning and includes writing an educational text. Second, the project will study how different pieces of information interact, both economically and algorithmically. Third, it will design systems that incentivize people to provide good information and aggregate it into useful outputs. These systems will be based on the above principles: valuing information economically and also processing it algorithmically. The high-level goal of the project is for these system designs to be useful for private and public organizations. Potential applications include data marketplaces, gathering public health information, and forecasting. The first part of the project studies the design of proper scoring rules and proper loss functions in decision making contexts. It includes writing a monograph on the field of information elicitation, given a loss function, what types of predictions and information can be provided by minimizing it, and vice versa. In a decision-making context, scoring rules and loss functions each define a value of information. The first part also investigates the relationship between value of information, good decision making, and accurate predictions, focusing on properties such as strong convexity of the utility and/or loss. The second part investigates the complexity of sequentially communicating and aggregating multiple pieces of information for decision making. This problem is related to classical communication complexity but explored in a fully Bayesian context with success measured by expected utility. Here, the proje

Key facts

NSF award ID
2542666
Awardee
University of Colorado at Boulder (CO)
SAM.gov UEI
SPVKK1RC2MZ3
PI
Bo Waggoner
Primary program
01002627DB NSF RESEARCH & RELATED ACTIVIT
All programs
Artificial Intelligence (AI), CAREER-Faculty Erly Career Dev, ALGORITHMS, COMPUT GAME THEORY & ECON
Estimated total
$743,315
Funds obligated
$432,921
Transaction type
Continuing Grant
Period
10/01/2026 → 09/30/2031