Sciweavers

UAI
2004

Sequential Information Elicitation in Multi-Agent Systems

13 years 5 months ago
Sequential Information Elicitation in Multi-Agent Systems
We introduce the study of sequential information elicitation in strategic multi-agent systems. In an information elicitation setup a center attempts to compute the value of a function based on private information (a-ka secrets) accessible to a set of agents. We consider the classical multi-party computation setup where each agent is interested in knowing the result of the function. However, in our setting each agent is strategic, and since acquiring information is costly, an agent may be tempted not spending the efforts of obtaining the information, free-riding on other agents' computations. A mechanism which elicits agents' secrets and performs the desired computation defines a game. A mechanism is `appropriate' if there exists an equilibrium in which it is able to elicit (sufficiently many) agents' secrets and perform the computation, for all possible secret vectors. We characterize a general efficient procedure for determining an appropriate mechanism, if such m...
Rann Smorodinsky, Moshe Tennenholtz
Added 31 Oct 2010
Updated 31 Oct 2010
Type Conference
Year 2004
Where UAI
Authors Rann Smorodinsky, Moshe Tennenholtz
Comments (0)