Results 21 - 30
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282
Optimal mechanism design and money burning
- STOC ’08
, 2008
"... Mechanism design is now a standard tool in computer science for aligning the incentives of self-interested agents with the objectives of a system designer. There is, however, a fundamental disconnect between the traditional application domains of mechanism design (such as auctions) and those arising ..."
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Cited by 57 (15 self)
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Mechanism design is now a standard tool in computer science for aligning the incentives of self-interested agents with the objectives of a system designer. There is, however, a fundamental disconnect between the traditional application domains of mechanism design (such as auctions) and those arising in computer science (such as networks): while monetary transfers (i.e., payments) are essential for most of the known positive results in mechanism design, they are undesirable or even technologically infeasible in many computer systems. Classical impossibility results imply that the reach of mechanisms without transfers is severely limited. Computer systems typically do have the ability to reduce service quality—routing systems can drop or delay traffic, scheduling protocols can delay the release of jobs, and computational payment schemes can require computational payments from users (e.g., in spam-fighting systems). Service degradation is tantamount to requiring that users burn money, and such “payments ” can be used to influence the preferences of the agents at a cost of degrading the social surplus. We develop a framework for the design and analysis of money-burning mechanisms to maximize the residual surplus— the total value of the chosen outcome minus the payments required. Our primary contributions are the following. • We define a general template for prior-free optimal mechanism design that explicitly connects Bayesian optimal mechanism design, the dominant paradigm in economics, with worst-case analysis. In particular, we establish a general and principled way to identify appropriate performance benchmarks in prior-free mechanism design. • For general single-parameter agent settings, we char-
Pricing WiFi at Starbucks - Issues in Online Mechanism Design
- In Fourth ACM Conf. on Electronic Commerce (EC’03
, 2003
"... We consider the problem of designing mechanisms for online problems in which agents arrive over time and the mechanism is unaware of the agent until the agent announces her arrival. Problems of this sort are becoming extremely common particularly in a wide variety of problems involving wireless n ..."
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Cited by 57 (13 self)
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We consider the problem of designing mechanisms for online problems in which agents arrive over time and the mechanism is unaware of the agent until the agent announces her arrival. Problems of this sort are becoming extremely common particularly in a wide variety of problems involving wireless networking.
Mechanism Design for Policy Routing
, 2006
"... The Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) for interdomain routing is designed to allow autonomous systems (ASes) to express policy preferences over alternative routes. We model these preferences as arising from an AS’s underlying utility for each route and study the problem of finding a set of routes that ..."
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Cited by 56 (8 self)
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The Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) for interdomain routing is designed to allow autonomous systems (ASes) to express policy preferences over alternative routes. We model these preferences as arising from an AS’s underlying utility for each route and study the problem of finding a set of routes that maximizes the overall welfare (i.e., the sum of all ASes’ utilities for their selected routes). We show that, if the utility functions are unrestricted, this problem is NP-hard even to approximate closely. We then study a natural class of restricted utilities that we call next-hop preferences. We present a strategy-proof, polynomial-time computable mechanism for welfare-maximizing routing over this restricted domain. However, we show that, in contrast to earlier work on lowest-cost routing mechanism design, this mechanism appears to be incompatible with
Distributed Implementations of Vickrey-Clarke-Groves Mechanisms
- in Proc. 3rd Int. Joint Conf. on Autonomous Agents and Multi Agent Systems
, 2004
"... Mechanism design (MD) provides a useful method to implement outcomes with desirable properties in systems with self-interested computational agents. One drawback, however, is that computation is implicitly centralized in MD theory, with a central planner taking all decisions. We consider distributed ..."
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Cited by 49 (10 self)
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Mechanism design (MD) provides a useful method to implement outcomes with desirable properties in systems with self-interested computational agents. One drawback, however, is that computation is implicitly centralized in MD theory, with a central planner taking all decisions. We consider distributed implementations, in which the outcome is determined by the self-interested agents themselves. Clearly this introduces new opportunities for manipulation. We propose a number of principles to guide the distribution of computation, focusing in particular on Vickrey-Clarke-Groves mechanisms for implementing outcomes that maximize total value across agents. Our solutions bring the complete implementation into an ex post Nash equilibrium.
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
Managing shared access to a spectrum commons
- in IEEE Symposium on New Frontiers in Dynamic Spectrum Access Networks (DySPAN’05
, 2005
"... * * draft ** Abstract- The open access, unlicensed or spectrum commons approach to managing shared access to RF spectrum offers many attractive benefits, especially when implemented in conjunction with and as a complement to a regime of marketbased, flexible use, tradable licensed spectrum ([Benkler ..."
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Cited by 48 (0 self)
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* * draft ** Abstract- The open access, unlicensed or spectrum commons approach to managing shared access to RF spectrum offers many attractive benefits, especially when implemented in conjunction with and as a complement to a regime of marketbased, flexible use, tradable licensed spectrum ([Benkler02], [Lehr04], [Werbach03]). However, as a number of critics have pointed out, implementing the unlicensed model poses difficult challenges that have not been well-addressed yet by commons advocates ([Benjam03], [Faulhab05], [Goodman04], [Hazlett01]). A successful spectrum commons will not be unregulated, but it also need not be command & control by another name. This paper seeks to address some of the implementation challenges associated with managing a spectrum commons. We focus on the minimal set of features that we believe a suitable management protocol, etiquette, or framework for a spectrum commons will need to incorporate. This includes: (1) No transmit only devices; (2) Power restrictions; (3) Common channel signaling; (4) Mechanism for handling congestion and allocating resources among users/uses in times of congestion; (5) Mechanism to support enforcement (e.g., established procedures to verify protocol is in conformance); (6) Mechanism to support reversibility of policy; and (7) Protection for privacy and security. We explain why each is necessary, examine their implications for current policy, and suggest ways in which they might be implemented. We present a framework that suggests a set of design principles for the protocols that will govern a successful commons management regime. Our design rules lead us to conclude that the appropriate Protocols for a Commons will need to be more liquid ([Reed05]) than in the past: (1) Marketbased instead of C&C; (2) Decentralized/distributed; and, (3) Adaptive and flexible (Anonymous, distributed, decentralized, and locally responsive). 1
Concurrent Auctions across the Supply Chain
, 2001
"... In this paper we design protocols for exchange of information between a sequence of markets along a single supply chain. These protocols allow each of these markets to function separately, while the information exchanged guarantees efficient global behavior across the supply chain. Each market form ..."
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Cited by 46 (2 self)
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In this paper we design protocols for exchange of information between a sequence of markets along a single supply chain. These protocols allow each of these markets to function separately, while the information exchanged guarantees efficient global behavior across the supply chain. Each market form a link in the supply chain operates as a double auction, where the bids on one side of the double auction come from bidders in the corresponding segment of the industry, and the bids on the other side are synthetically generated by the protocol to express the combined information from all other links in the chain. The double auctions in each of the markets can be of several types, and we study several variants of incentive compatible double auctions, comparing them in terms of their efficiency and of the market revenue.
A case for taxation in peer-to-peer streaming broadcast
- In Proc. of the ACM SIGCOMM workshop on Practice and theory of incentives in networked systems
, 2004
"... ..."
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Bootstrapping a Distributed Computational Economy with Peer-to-Peer Bartering
- WORKSHOP ON ECONOMICS OF PEER-TO-PEER SYSTEMS
, 2003
"... This paper presents an architecture for distributed computational economies based on peer-to-peer bartering. Our architecture is based on the position that computational economies ought to be bootstrapped based on a layer of simple and robust resource exchange. The architecture is comprised of three ..."
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Cited by 44 (6 self)
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This paper presents an architecture for distributed computational economies based on peer-to-peer bartering. Our architecture is based on the position that computational economies ought to be bootstrapped based on a layer of simple and robust resource exchange. The architecture is comprised of three pieces: (i) resource discovery, (ii) secure resource peering, and (iii) bartering. Together, these pieces address the end-to-end problem of describing, discovering, and exchanging distributed resources in a secure and decentralized manner. Key in our approach is the ability to securely exchange resources across delegated paths of trust. This, combined with secure resource peering, allows peers to engage in resource exchange with directly connected peers, in addition to peers whom they do not have direct bartering relationships with. Given the bartering economy as a base, we envision an evolutionary path towards more complex scenarios by layering richer functionality at higher layers.
Rationality and Traffic Attraction: Incentives for Honest Path Announcements in BGP
, 2008
"... We study situations in which autonomous systems (ASes) may have incentives to send BGP announcements differing from the AS-level paths that packets traverse in the data plane. Prior work on this issue assumed that ASes seek only to obtain the best possible outgoing path for their traffic. In reality ..."
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Cited by 43 (7 self)
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We study situations in which autonomous systems (ASes) may have incentives to send BGP announcements differing from the AS-level paths that packets traverse in the data plane. Prior work on this issue assumed that ASes seek only to obtain the best possible outgoing path for their traffic. In reality, other factors can influence a rational AS’s behavior. Here we consider a more natural model, in which an AS is also interested in attracting incoming traffic (e.g., because other ASes pay it to carry their traffic). We ask what combinations of BGP enhancements and restrictions on routing policies can ensure that ASes have no incentive to lie about their data-plane paths. We find that protocols like S-BGP alone are insufficient, but that S-BGP does suffice if coupled with additional (quite unrealistic) restrictions on routing policies. Our game-theoretic analysis illustrates the high cost of ensuring that the ASes honestly announce data-plane paths in their BGP path announcements.
