优化 | Management Science 7-8月文章精选: 信息系统中的运筹学

作者：Evelyn Yao 清华大学本科在读

在“Management Science近期论文精选”中，我们有主题、有针对性地选择了Management Science中一些有趣的文章，不仅对文章的内容进行了概括与点评，而且也对文章的结构进行了梳理，旨在激发广大读者的阅读兴趣与探索热情。在本期“论文精选”中，我们以“信息系统”为主题，分别探究了“在线平台用户反馈”、“健康信息的交流对医疗质量和效率的影响”、“线上市场的雇佣选择”、“机器学习的算法透明化”和“专业房东在P2P市场上的作用”五方面主题，涉及线性优化、贝叶斯-纳什均衡理论、隐马尔可夫模型、条件逻辑模型、信号博弈等多项内容。

推荐文章1

发表时间：2022.7.01

● 题目：The Square Root Agreement Rule for Incentivizing Truthful Feedback on Online Platforms

用平方根协议规则来激励在线平台的真实反馈

● 期刊：Management Science

● 原文链接：https://doi.org/10.1287/mnsc.2022.4375

● 作者：Vijay Kamble, Nihar Shah, David Marn, Abhay Parekh, Kannan Ramchandran

● 关键词：information systems: IT policy and management （信息系统：IT政策管理）• electronic commerce（电子商务） • information systems: systems analysis and design （信息系统：系统分析与设计）• systems design and implementation（系统设计与执行） • economics: game theory and bargaining theory（经济学：博弈论与协商理论）

● 摘要：

A major challenge in obtaining evaluations of products or services on e-commerce platforms is eliciting informative responses in the absence of verifiability. This paper proposes the square root agreement rule (SRA): a simple reward mechanism that incentivizes truthful responses to objective evaluations on such platforms. In this mechanism, an agent gets a reward for an evaluation only if the answer matches that of a peer agent, where this reward is inversely proportional to a popularity index of the answer. This index is defined to be the square root of the empirical frequency at which any two agents performing the same evaluation agree on the particular answer across evaluations of similar entities operating on the platform. Rarely agreed-on answers thus earn a higher reward than answers for which agreements are relatively more common. We show that in the many tasks regime, the truthful equilibrium under SRA is strictly payoff-dominant across large classes of natural equilibria that could arise in these settings, thus increasing the likelihood of its adoption. Although there exist other mechanisms achieving such guarantees, they either impose additional assumptions on the response distribution that are not generally satisfied for objective evaluations or they incentivize truthful behavior only if each agent performs a prohibitively large number of evaluations and commits to using the same strategy for each evaluation. SRA is the first known incentive mechanism satisfying such guarantees without imposing any such requirements. Moreover, our empirical findings demonstrate the robustness of the incentive properties of SRA in the presence of mild subjectivity or observational biases in the responses. These properties make SRA uniquely attractive for administering reward-based incentive schemes (e.g., rebates, discounts, reputation scores, etc.) on online platforms.

在电子商务平台上获得产品或服务评价的一个主要挑战是我们一直在对不可验证的信息做出反应。本文提出了平方根协议规则(SRA)：一种简单的奖励机制，以激励人们在这类平台上客观评价、真实反应。在这一机制中，只有当答案与同行代理的答案一致时，代理才会获得评价的奖励，这种奖励与答案的流行指数成反比。这个指数被定义为一种经验频率的平方根，这种平方根是两个代理不仅在此产品的评价一致、而且在类似实体的评价中对特定答案达成一致的一种经验频率的平方根。因此，达成一致意见较少的答案比达成一致意见相对较多的答案获得更多的奖励。我们表明，在许多任务制度中，SRA方法下的真正均衡是严格的报酬主导型，这就增加了采用此规则的可能性。尽管存在其他实现这种保证的机制，但它们要么对响应目标的概率分布施加了额外的假设，而这些假设并不能满足我们客观评价的需要，要么它们只在每个代理人进行大量评价并承诺对每个评价使用相同的策略时才会激励真实行为。SRA是第一种已知的激励机制，在不施加任何此类要求的情况下满足此类保证。此外，我们的经验发现证明了在反应中存在轻微的主观性或观察偏差的情况下，SRA法激励特性的鲁棒性。这些特性使得SRA法对于在网络平台上管理基于奖励的激励