Quantum Information Elicitation

Abstract: In the classic scoring rule setting, a principal incentivizes an agent to truthfully report their probabilistic belief about some future outcome. This paper addresses the situation when this private belief, rather than a classical probability distribution, is instead a quantum mixed state. In the resulting quantum scoring rule setting, the principal chooses both a scoring function and a measurement function, and the agent responds with their reported density matrix. Several characterizations of quantum scoring rules are presented, which reveal a familiar structure based on convex analysis. Spectral scores, where the measurement function is given by the spectral decomposition of the reported density matrix, have particularly elegant structure and connect to quantum information theory. Turning to property elicitation, eigenvectors of the belief are elicitable, whereas eigenvalues and entropy have maximal elicitation complexity. The paper concludes with a discussion of other quantum information elicitation settings and connections to the literature.