Predicting Your Own Effort

We consider a setting in which a worker and a manager may each have information about the likely completion time of a task, and the worker also affects the completion time by choosing a level of effort. The task itself may further be composed of a set of subtasks, and the worker can also decide how many of these subtasks to split out into an explicit prediction task. In addition, a worker can learn about the likely completion time of a task as work on subtasks completes. We characterize a family of scoring rules for the worker and manager that provide three properties: information is truthfully reported, best effort is exerted by the worker in completing tasks as quickly as possible; and collusion is not possible. We also study the factors influencing when a worker will split a task into subtasks, each forming a separate prediction target.

Authors

• David F. Bacon
• Yiling Chen
• Ian Kash
• David Parkes Harvard University
• Malvika Rao Harvard University
• Manu Sridharan

Keywords

• Information Elicitation
• Proper Scoring Rule
• Principal-Agent