When to Request Evidence?

TL;DR

This paper examines how a decision-maker should optimally request verifiable evidence from an agent with biased incentives in a dynamic setting, highlighting the importance of biased evidence requests to prevent manipulation.

Contribution

It introduces a dynamic framework for scheduling evidence requests considering agent incentives, revealing that biased requests can improve decision quality.

Findings

Optimal evidence requests should be biased towards reports favoring the agent.

Ignoring agent incentives leads to non-conditioned evidence requests.

Biased requests help mitigate strategic manipulation by the agent.

Abstract

Appropriate decisions depend on information gathered beforehand, yet such information is often obtained through intermediaries with biased preferences. Motivated by settings such as testing and recertification in organ transplantation, we study the problem faced by a decision-maker who can only access costly information through an agent with misaligned preferences. In a dynamic framework with exogenous decision timing, we ask how requests for verifiable information (evidence) should be scheduled and their implications for the quality of attained choices. When the agent's incentives are ignored, evidence requests do not condition on previously reported information. However, such policies may be susceptible to strategic manipulation by the agent. We show that, in these cases, optimal requests should be biased: additional evidence is more likely to be sought when previous reports favor the agent's preferred outcome.