This paper presents findings of a pilot study which used pedagogical agents to examine disclosure in educational settings. The study used responsive evaluation to explore how use of pedagogical agents might affect students’ truthfulness and disclosure by asking them to respond to a lifestyle choices survey delivered by a webbased pedagogical agent. Findings indicate that emotional connection wi...

Proper scoring rules elicit truth-telling when making predictions, or otherwise revealing information. However, when multiple predictions are made of the same event, telling the truth is in general no longer optimal, as agents are motivated to distort early predictions to mislead competitors. We demonstrate this, and then prove a significant exception: In a multi-agent prediction setting where ...

We present a model of truthful elicitation which generalizes and extends mechanisms, scoring rules, number related settings that do not qualify as one or the other. Our main result is characterization theorem, yielding characterizations for all these settings. This includes new rules non-convex sets distributions. combine theorem with duality to give simple construction convert between randomiz...

We show that collusion and wrong beliefs may cause a dramatic efficiency loss in the Vickrey mechanism for auctioning a single good in limited supply. We thus put forward a new mechanism guaranteeing efficiency in a very adversarial collusion model, where the players can partition themselves into arbitrarily many coalitions, exchange money with each other, and perfectly coordinate their actions...

This short note exhibits a truthful-in-expectation O( logm log logm )-approximation mechanism for combinatorial auctions with subadditive bidders that uses polynomial communication.

This paper questions the widespread view that verbal communication is governed by a maxim, norm or convention of literal truthfulness. Pragmatic frameworks based on this view must explain the common occurrence and acceptability of metaphor, hyperbole and loose talk. We argue against existing explanations of these phenomena and provide an alternative account, based on the assumption that verbal ...