Online Prediction with Selfish Experts

We consider the problem of binary prediction with expert advice in settings where experts have agency and seek to maximize their credibility. This paper makes three main contributions. First, it defines a model to reason formally about settings with selfish experts, and demonstrates that “incentive compatible” (IC) algorithms are closely related to the design of proper scoring rules. Second, we design IC algorithms with good performance guarantees for the absolute loss function. Third, we give a formal separation between the power of online prediction with selfish versus honest experts by proving lower bounds for both IC and non-IC algorithms. In particular, with selfish experts and the absolute loss function, there is no (randomized) algorithm for online prediction—IC or otherwise—with asymptotically vanishing regret.