Making an Appraiser Work for You

Paper: https://arxiv.org/abs/1804.08314

 

You own an item and want to know its value. There is an appraiser who can calculate the value by investing some work. You want to convince the appraiser to invest this work and tell you the value. Unfortunately you have no way to verify that the appraiser's report is correct. Therefore, if you simply pay the appraiser the cost of doing the work in cash, he can take the cash and report some random value instead of doing the work. I will show a mechanism by which you can incentivize the appraiser to actually work and report the true value.

 

Joint work with Shani Alokbi, Dudi Sarne and Tomer Sharbaf.