Evaluation and strategic manipulation

We consider the problem of a group of experts who have to rank a set of candidates. Society's optimal choice relies on experts' honest judgments about the deserving ranking. However, experts' judgments are impossible to verify. Moreover, experts' judgments do not entirely determine their preferences. Then, experts might want to misreport their judgments if, by doing so, some ranking that they like best is selected. To solve this problem, we have to design a mechanism where the experts interact so that the socially optimal ranking is implemented. Whether this is possible depends on (1) how experts' judgments are aggregated to determine the socially optimal ranking and (2) how experts' preferences relate to their judgments. We state conditions on these two elements for the socially optimal ranking to be implementable in dominant strategies and Nash equilibrium.(c) 2023 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.