# Strategyproof Decision-Making in Panel Data Settings and Beyond

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2211.14236 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.14236/

## Key facts

- Cited by 4 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 18 of its 53 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 25 Nov 2022.

## Builds on (most cited first, 18 of 18)

- [Strategic Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1506.06980/) (2015)
- [Strategic Classification from Revealed Preferences](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1710.07887/) (2017)
- [How Do Classifiers Induce Agents To Invest Effort Strategically?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1807.05307/) (2018)
- [Strategic Classification in the Dark](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.11592/) (2021)
- [Causal Strategic Linear Regression](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2002.10066/) (2020)
- [Strategic Classification Made Practical](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.01826/) (2021)
- [The Strategic Perceptron](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2008.01710/) (2020)
- [Information Discrepancy in Strategic Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.01028/) (2021)
- [Alternative Microfoundations for Strategic Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.12705/) (2021)
- [Causal Matrix Completion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.15154/) (2021)
- [Synthetic Difference in Differences](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.09970/) (2018)
- [Stateful Strategic Regression](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.03827/) (2021)
- [Strategic Instrumental Variable Regression: Recovering Causal Relationships From Strategic Responses](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.05762/) (2021)
- [On Robustness of Principal Component Regression](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1902.10920/) (2019)
- [Synthetic Interventions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.07691/) (2020)
- [Robust Synthetic Control](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.06940/) (2017)
- [The Augmented Synthetic Control Method](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1811.04170/) (2018)
- [Bayesian Persuasion for Algorithmic Recourse](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.06283/) (2021)

## Built on by (most cited first, 4 of 4)

- [Strategic Apple Tasting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.06250/) (2023)
- [Adaptive Principal Component Regression with Applications to Panel Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.01357/) (2023)
- [Incentive-Aware Machine Learning; Robustness, Fairness, Improvement & Causality](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.05211/) (2025)
- [Incentive-Aware Synthetic Control: Accurate Counterfactual Estimation via Incentivized Exploration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.16307/) (2023)

## Abstract (arXiv)

We consider the problem of decision-making using panel data, in which a decision-maker gets noisy, repeated measurements of multiple units (or agents). We consider a setup where there is a pre-intervention period, when the principal observes the outcomes of each unit, after which the principal uses these observations to assign a treatment to each unit. Unlike this classical setting, we permit the units generating the panel data to be strategic, i.e. units may modify their pre-intervention outcomes in order to receive a more desirable intervention. The principal's goal is to design a strategyproof intervention policy, i.e. a policy that assigns units to their utility-maximizing interventions despite their potential strategizing. We first identify a necessary and sufficient condition under which a strategyproof intervention policy exists, and provide a strategyproof mechanism with a simple closed form when one does exist. Along the way, we prove impossibility results for strategic multiclass classification, which may be of independent interest. When there are two interventions, we establish that there always exists a strategyproof mechanism, and provide an algorithm for learning such a mechanism. For three or more interventions, we provide an algorithm for learning a strategyproof mechanism if there exists a sufficiently large gap in the principal's rewards between different interventions. Finally, we empirically evaluate our model using real-world panel data collected from product sales over 18 months. We find that our methods compare favorably to baselines which do not take strategic interactions into consideration, even in the presence of model misspecification.