Title
Accuracy for Sale: Aggregating Data with a Variance Constraint
Abstract
We consider the problem of a data analyst who may purchase an unbiased estimate of some statistic from multiple data providers. From each provider i, the analyst has a choice: she may purchase an estimate from that provider that has variance chosen from a finite menu of options. Each level of variance has a cost associated with it, reported (possibly strategically) by the data provider. The analyst wants to choose the minimum cost set of variance levels, one from each provider, that will let her combine her purchased estimators into an aggregate estimator that has variance at most some fixed desired level. Moreover, she wants to do so in such a way that incentivizes the data providers to truthfully report their costs to the mechanism. We give a dominant strategy truthful solution to this problem that yields an estimator that has optimal expected cost, and violates the variance constraint by at most an additive term that tends to zero as the number of data providers grows large.
Year
DOI
Venue
2015
10.1145/2688073.2688106
ITCS
Keywords
Field
DocType
buying data,general,mechanism design,vcg mechanism
Econometrics,Multiple data,Statistic,Computer science,Strategic dominance,Vickrey–Clarke–Groves auction,Mechanism design,Expected cost,Statistics,Estimator
Conference
Citations 
PageRank 
References 
15
0.72
13
Authors
5
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Rachel Cummings119411.97
Katrina Ligett292366.19
Aaron Roth31937110.48
Zhiwei Steven Wu415730.92
Juba Ziani5295.77