Mechanism design for multi-agent meeting scheduling

In this paper we examine the benefits and limitations of mechanism design as it applies to multi-agent meeting scheduling. We look at the problem of scheduling multiple meetings between various groups of agents that arise over time. All the agents have private information regarding their time preferences for meetings. Our aim is to elicit this information and assign the meetings to times in a way that maximizes social welfare. We discuss problems with previous attempts to design incentive compatible (IC) and individually rational (IR) mechanisms for meeting scheduling. We show how requesting agent preferences for entire schedules helps to eliminate IC problems. We focus, in particular, on the problem of determining when agents are available for meetings. We show that our choice of IC and IR mechanisms is quite restricted when we allow agents to declare their availability.