On decentralized incentive compatible mechanisms

Algorithmic Mechanism Design focuses on Dominant Strategy Implementations. The main positive results are the celebrated Vickrey-Clarke-Groves (VCG) mechanisms and computationally efficient mechanisms for severely restricted players (“single-parameter domains”). As it turns out, many natural social goals cannot be implemented using the dominant-strategy concept [37, 33, 22, 20]. This suggests that the standard requirements must be relaxed in order to construct general-purpose mechanisms. We observe that in many common distributed environments computational entities can take advantage of the network structure to collect and distribute information. We thus suggest a notion of partially informed environments. Even if the information is recorded with some probability, this enables us to implement a wider range of social goals, using the concept of iterative elimination of weakly dominated strategies. As a result, cooperation is achieved independent of agents’ belief. As a case study,...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2005
• Where: SIGECOM
• Authors: Ahuva Mu'alem
• Keywords: Algorithmic Mechanism Design, Dominant Strategy Implementations, SIGECOM 2005, Social Goals