Automated Design of Multistage Mechanisms
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Mechanism design is the study of preference aggregation protocols that work well in the face of self-interested agents. We present the first general-purpose techniques for automatically designing multistage mechanisms. These can reduce elicitation burden by only querying agents for information that is relevant given their answers to previous queries. We first show how to turn a given(e.g., automatically designed using constrained optimization techniques) single-stage mechanism into the most efficient corresponding multistage mechanism given a specified elicitation tree. We then present greedy and dynamic programming (DP) algorithms that determine the elicitation tree (optimal in the DP case). Next, we show how the query savings inherent in the multistage model can be used to design the underlying single-stage mechanism to maximally take advantage of this approach. Finally, we present negative results on the design of multistage mechanisms that do not correspond to dominant-strategy single-stage mechanisms: an optimal multistage mechanism in general has to randomize over queries to hide information from the agents.
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Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.005 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.009 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.004 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.002 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it