Information Elicitation Without Verification (IEWV) refers to the problem of eliciting high-accuracy solutions from crowd members when the ground truth is unverifiable. A high-accuracy team solution (aggregated from members' solutions) requires members' effort exertion, which should be incentivized properly. Previous research on IEWV mainly focused on scenarios where a central entity (e.g., the crowdsourcing platform) provides incentives to motivate crowd members. Still, the proposed designs do not apply to practical situations where no central entity exists. This paper studies the overlooked decentralized IEWV scenario, where crowd members act as both incentive contributors and task solvers. We model the interactions among members with heterogeneous team solution accuracy valuations as a two-stage game, where each member decides her incentive contribution strategy in Stage 1 and her effort exertion strategy in Stage 2. We analyze members' equilibrium behaviors under three incentive allocation mechanisms: Equal Allocation (EA), Output Agreement (OA), and Shapley Value (SV). We show that at an equilibrium under any allocation mechanism, a low-valuation member exerts no more effort than a high-valuation member. Counter-intuitively, a low-valuation member provides incentives to the collaboration while a high-valuation member does not at an equilibrium under SV. This is because a high-valuation member who values the aggregated team solution more needs fewer incentives to exert effort. In addition, when members' valuations are sufficiently heterogeneous, SV leads to team solution accuracy and social welfare no smaller than EA and OA.

翻译：无需验证的信息征询（IEWV）指在真实答案不可验证时，从群体成员中获取高精度解决方案的问题。高精度的团队解决方案（由成员方案聚合而成）需要成员付出努力，且需通过适当激励来保障。先前对IEWV的研究主要聚焦于存在中心实体（如众包平台）提供激励的场景，但所提出的设计不适用于无中心实体的实际情境。本文研究被忽视的去中心化IEWV场景，其中群体成员既是激励贡献者又是任务解决者。我们将具有异质性团队方案精度估值的成员间交互建模为两阶段博弈：第一阶段每个成员决定其激励贡献策略，第二阶段决定其努力付出策略。我们分析了三种激励分配机制下的成员均衡行为：均等分配（EA）、输出一致性（OA）和沙普利值（SV）。研究表明，在任何分配机制的均衡状态下，低估值成员的付出努力均不高于高估值成员。反直觉的是，在SV机制下，低估值成员为合作提供激励，而高估值成员则不提供——这是因为更重视聚合团队方案的高估值成员不需要过多激励即可付出努力。此外，当成员估值差异足够大时，SV产生的团队方案精度和社会福利均不低于EA和OA。