Optimal Questionnaires for Screening of Strategic Agents

TL;DR

This paper studies optimal questioning strategies to accurately classify travelers' health status during pandemics, accounting for strategic misreporting and revealing fundamental limits of classification accuracy.

Contribution

It introduces a framework for designing questionnaires that account for strategic behavior, establishing theoretical limits on classification accuracy in such settings.

Findings

Fundamental limits on classification accuracy with strategic respondents

Framework for designing optimal questionnaires under strategic misreporting

Insights into trade-offs between information gain and strategic behavior

Abstract

During the COVID-$19$ pandemic the health authorities at airports and train stations try to screen and identify the travellers possibly exposed to the virus. However, many individuals avoid getting tested and hence may misreport their travel history. This is a challenge for the health authorities who wish to ascertain the truly susceptible cases in spite of this strategic misreporting. We investigate the problem of questioning travellers to classify them for further testing when the travellers are strategic or are unwilling to reveal their travel histories. We show there are fundamental limits to how many travel histories the health authorities can recover.% can be correctly classified by any probing mechanism.