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SAGT
2009
Springer

Better with Byzantine: Manipulation-Optimal Mechanisms

13 years 10 months ago
Better with Byzantine: Manipulation-Optimal Mechanisms
Abstract. A mechanism is manipulable if it is in some agents’ best interest to misrepresent their private information. The revelation principle establishes that, roughly, anything that can be accomplished by a manipulable mechanism can also be accomplished with a truthful mechanism. Yet agents often fail to play their optimal manipulations due to computational limitations or various flavors of incompetence and cognitive biases. Thus, manipulable mechanisms in particular should anticipate byzantine play. We study manipulation-optimal mechanisms: mechanisms that are undominated by truthful mechanisms when agents act fully rationally, and do better than any truthful mechanism if any agent fails to act rationally in any way. This enables the mechanism designer to do better than the revelation principle would suggest, and obviates the need to predict byzantine agents’ irrational behavior. We prove a host of possibility and impossibility results for the concept which have the impression...
Abraham Othman, Tuomas Sandholm
Added 27 May 2010
Updated 27 May 2010
Type Conference
Year 2009
Where SAGT
Authors Abraham Othman, Tuomas Sandholm
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