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  5. Scoring Strategic Agents

American Economic Journal:
Microeconomics

ISSN 1945-7669 (Print) | ISSN 1945-7685 (Online)

Scoring Strategic Agents

  • Ian Ball
American Economic Journal: Microeconomics (Forthcoming)

Abstract

I introduce a model of predictive scoring. A receiver wants to predict a sender’s quality. An intermediary observes multiple features of the sender and aggregates them into a score. Based on the score, the receiver makes a decision. The sender prefers “higher” decisions, and she can distort each feature at a privately known cost. I characterize the scoring rule that maximizes decision accuracy. This rule underweights some features to deter sender distortion, and overweights other features so that the score is correct on average. The receiver prefers this scoring rule to full disclosure because it mitigates his commitment problem.

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