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Specification Faithfulness in Networks with Rational Nodes
, 2004
"... It is useful to prove that an implementation correctly follows a specification. But even with a provably correct implementation, given a choice, would a node choose to follow it? This paper explores how to create distributed system specifications that will be faithfully implemented in networks with ..."
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Cited by 66 (10 self)
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It is useful to prove that an implementation correctly follows a specification. But even with a provably correct implementation, given a choice, would a node choose to follow it? This paper explores how to create distributed system specifications that will be faithfully implemented in networks with rational nodes, so that no node will choose to deviate. Given a strategyproof centralized mechanism, and given a network of nodes modeled as having rational-manipulation faults, we provide a proof technique to establish the incentive-, communication-, and algorithm-compatibility properties that guarantee that participating nodes are faithful to a suggested specification. As a case study, we apply our methods to extend the strategyproof interdomain routing mechanism proposed by Feigenbaum, Papadimitriou, Sami, and Shenker (FPSS) [7], defining a faithful implementation.
Rational secure computation and ideal mechanism design
- In Proc. 46th IEEE Symp. Foundations of Computer Science
, 2005
"... Secure Computation essentially guarantees that whatever computation n players can do with the help of a trusted party, they can also do by themselves. Fundamentally, however, this notion depends on the honesty of at least some players. We put forward and implement a stronger notion, Rational Secure ..."
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Cited by 58 (4 self)
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Secure Computation essentially guarantees that whatever computation n players can do with the help of a trusted party, they can also do by themselves. Fundamentally, however, this notion depends on the honesty of at least some players. We put forward and implement a stronger notion, Rational Secure Computation, that does not depend on player honesty, but solely on player rationality. The key to our implementation is showing that the ballotbox—the venerable device used throughout the world to tally secret votes securely—can actually be used to securely compute any function. Our work bridges the fields of Game Theory and Cryptography, and has broad implications for Mechanism Design. 1 The Case for Rational Security Secure Computation. The general notion of Secure Computation was put forward and first exemplified by Goldreich, Micali and Wigderson [8], building on earlier two-party results of Yao [17]. Given a joint computation among n players and a trusted party, Secure Computation aims at removing the trusted party without suffering any correctness or privacy loss. A bit more precisely, all prior secure-computation work— by now quite extensive — adopts the original ideal/real paradigm, illustrated below in the crucial, special case of a secure function evaluation (SFE for short). An ideal evaluation of a (possibly probabilistic) ninput, n-output function f consists of the following process. Each player i has a private input, xi, and is assumed to be honest or malicious. An honest i simply confides his original xi to a trusted party. Malicious players may instead perfectly coordinate their actions, so as to compute and report to the trusted party alternative inputs x ′ j for every malicious player j. The trusted party then evaluates f on all reported inputs,
Towards a structured design of electronic negotiations
- GROUP DECISION AND NEGOTIATION
, 2003
"... Global communication networks and advances in information technology enable the design of information systems facilitating effective formulation and efficient resolution of negotiation problems. Increasingly, these systems guide negotiators in clarifying the relevant issues, provide media for offer ..."
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Cited by 50 (11 self)
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Global communication networks and advances in information technology enable the design of information systems facilitating effective formulation and efficient resolution of negotiation problems. Increasingly, these systems guide negotiators in clarifying the relevant issues, provide media for offer formulation and exchange, and help in achieving an agreement. In practice, the task of analysing, modelling, designing and implementing electronic negotiation media demands a systematic, traceable and reproducible approach. An engineering approach to media specification and construction has these characteristics. In this paper, we provide a rationale for the engineering approach that allows pragmatic adoption of economic and social sciences perspectives on negotiated decisions for the purpose of supporting and undertaking electronic negotiations. Similarities and differences of different theories that underlie on-going studies of electronic negotiations are identified. This provides a basis for integration of different theories and approaches for the specific purpose of the design of effective electronic negotiations. Drawing on diverse streams of literature in different fields such as economics, management, computer, and behavioural sciences, we present an example of an integration of three significant streams of theoretical and applied research involving negotiations, traditional auctions and on-line auctions.
M-dpop: Faithful distributed implementation of efficient social choice problems
- In AAMAS’06 - Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems
, 2006
"... In the efficient social choice problem, the goal is to assign values, subject to side constraints, to a set of variables to maximize the total utility across a population of agents, where each agent has private information about its utility function. In this paper we model the social choice problem ..."
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Cited by 48 (17 self)
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In the efficient social choice problem, the goal is to assign values, subject to side constraints, to a set of variables to maximize the total utility across a population of agents, where each agent has private information about its utility function. In this paper we model the social choice problem as a distributed constraint optimization problem (DCOP), in which each agent can communicate with other agents that share an interest in one or more variables. Whereas existing DCOP algorithms can be easily manipulated by an agent, either by misreporting private information or deviating from the algorithm, we introduce M-DPOP, the first DCOP algorithm that provides a faithful distributed implementation for efficient social choice. This provides a concrete example of how the methods of mechanism design can be unified with those of distributed optimization. Faithfulness ensures that no agent can benefit by unilaterally deviating from any aspect of the protocol, neither informationrevelation, computation, nor communication, and whatever the private information of other agents. We allow for payments by agents to a central bank, which is the only central authority that we require. To achieve faithfulness, we carefully integrate the Vickrey-Clarke-Groves (VCG) mechanism with the DPOP algorithm, such that each agent is only asked to perform computation, report
On the outcomes of formal interagent dialogues
- International Joint Conference on Autonomous Agents andMultiagent Systems
"... This paper studies argumentation-based dialogues between agents. It takes a previously defined system by which agents can trade arguments and examines the outcomes of the dia-logues this system permits. In addition to providing a first characterisation of such outcomes, the paper also investi-gates ..."
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Cited by 36 (15 self)
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This paper studies argumentation-based dialogues between agents. It takes a previously defined system by which agents can trade arguments and examines the outcomes of the dia-logues this system permits. In addition to providing a first characterisation of such outcomes, the paper also investi-gates the extent to which outcomes are dependent on tacti-cal play by the agents, and arguing that this violates princi-ples of mechanism design, identifies how to prevent tactics having an effect.
Building Tractable Disjunctive Constraints
, 2000
"... ... This paper presents the first general results on combining tractable constraint classes to obtain larger, more general, tractable classes. We give examples to show that many known examples of tractable constraint classes, from a wide variety of different contexts, can be constructed from simpler ..."
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Cited by 26 (10 self)
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... This paper presents the first general results on combining tractable constraint classes to obtain larger, more general, tractable classes. We give examples to show that many known examples of tractable constraint classes, from a wide variety of different contexts, can be constructed from simpler tractable classes using a general method. We also construct several new tractable classes that have not previously been identified.
Co-Evolution of Auction Mechanisms and Trading Strategies: Towards a Novel Approach to Microeconomic Design
- In GECCO-02 Workshop on Evolutionary Computation in Multi-Agent Systems
, 2002
"... Mechanism design is the economic theory of the design of effective resource allocation mechanisms, such as auctions. Traditionally, economists have approached design problems by studying the analytic properties of different mechanisms. An alternative approach is to view the auction mechanism as the ..."
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Cited by 26 (8 self)
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Mechanism design is the economic theory of the design of effective resource allocation mechanisms, such as auctions. Traditionally, economists have approached design problems by studying the analytic properties of different mechanisms. An alternative approach is to view the auction mechanism as the outcome of some evolutionary process involving the participants: the buyers, sellers and the auctioneer. As a first step in this alternative direction, we have applied genetic programming to the development of an auction pricing rule for double auctions in a wholesale electricity marketplace. For this purpose we adopted the multi-agent simulation model of Nicolaisen, Petrov and Tesfatsion.
Reasoning About Space: The Hole Story
- Logic and Logical Philosophy
, 1996
"... this paper is to elaborate on that formalism and to illustrate how it can be exploited to provide a framework for more general patterns of REASONING ABOUT SPACE: THE HOLE STORY ..."
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Cited by 23 (14 self)
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this paper is to elaborate on that formalism and to illustrate how it can be exploited to provide a framework for more general patterns of REASONING ABOUT SPACE: THE HOLE STORY
The Limits of Self-Awareness
- Philosophical Studies
, 2004
"... The disjunctive theory of perception claims that we should understand statements about how things appear to a perceiver to be equivalent to statements of a disjunction that either one is perceiving such and such or one is suffering an illusion (or hallucination); and that such statements are not to ..."
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Cited by 21 (0 self)
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The disjunctive theory of perception claims that we should understand statements about how things appear to a perceiver to be equivalent to statements of a disjunction that either one is perceiving such and such or one is suffering an illusion (or hallucination); and that such statements are not to be viewed as introducing a report of a distinctive mental event or state common to these various disjoint situations. When Michael Hinton first introduced the idea, he suggested that the burden of proof or disproof lay with his opponent, that what was needed was to show that our talk of how things look or appear to one to be introduces more than what he later came to call perceptionillusion disjunctions: I do not at present see how it can be, or could be, shown that there is such a thing as (Q) [a statement which reports the occurrence of a visual experience in contrast to expressing a perception-illusion disjunction]. Consequently I do not see how it can be shown that there is such a thing as my psi-ing for these and other statements to be about; and since one surely should not make statements without being able to show that they are about something, this means that as far as I can see no such statements should be made. Perhaps I just can’t see far enough, but I should like to be shown that this is so. (Hinton, 1967, p. 220) I suspect that many readers on encountering either Hinton’s presentation of disjunctivism or the accounts of it available from Snowdon or McDowell, would find surprising this demand that the burden of proof for the existence of a non-disjunctive sensory experience. Surely we know what a sensory experience is in just the sense that Hinton is denying. What we don’t know, the line of the thought may go, is quite what the disjunctivist is saying in its place. Doesn’t the burden of proof lie, then, with the disjunctive theory of appearances: first to clarify further what it has to say, and then to offer some appropriate defence of these outlandish claims?
2007): “Efficient Online Mechanisms for Persistent, Periodically Inaccessible Self-Interested Agents,” Unpublished manuscript
"... We consider the problem of implementing a system-optimal decision policy in the context of self-interested agents with private state in an uncertain world. Unique to our model is that we allow both persistent agents, with a an agent having a local MDP model to describe how its local world evolves gi ..."
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Cited by 20 (8 self)
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We consider the problem of implementing a system-optimal decision policy in the context of self-interested agents with private state in an uncertain world. Unique to our model is that we allow both persistent agents, with a an agent having a local MDP model to describe how its local world evolves given actions by a center, and also periodically-inaccessible agents, with an agent unable to report information while inaccessible. We first review the dynamic-VCGmechanism of Bergemann and Valimaki (2006), which handles persistent agents. We offer an independent, simple proof of its correctness. We propose a generalized mechanism, dynamic-VCG#, to allow also for inaccessibility, and identify conditions for its correctness. In closing, we observe that the mechanism is equivalent to the earlier online-VCG mechanism of Parkes and Singh (2003) in a restricted model. 1
