Peer-prediction mechanisms elicit information about unverifiable or subjective states of the world. Existing mechanisms in the class are designed so participants maximize their expected payments when reporting honestly. However, these mechanisms do not account for participants desiring influence over how reports are used. When participants want the conclusions drawn from reports to reflect thei...

The decentralized cryptocurrency Bitcoin has experienced great success but also encountered many challenges. One of the challenges has been the long confirmation time and low transaction throughput. Another challenge is the lack of incentives at certain steps of the protocol, raising concerns for transaction withholding, selfish mining, etc. To address these challenges, we propose Solidus, a de...

We present the design and analysis of an approximately incentive-compatible combinatorial auction. In just a single run, the auction is able to extract enough value information from bidders to compute approximate truth-inducing payments. This stands in contrast to current auction designs that need to repeat the allocation computation as many times as there are bidders to achieve incentive compa...

An allocation rule is called Bayes-Nash incentive compatible, if there exists a payment rule, such that truthful reports of agents’ types form a Bayes-Nash equilibrium in the direct revelation mechanism consisting of the allocation rule and the payment rule. This paper provides a characterization of Bayes-Nash incentive compatible allocation rules in social choice settings where agents have mul...

We present a market-based approach to the Air Traffic Flow Management (ATFM) problem. The goods in our market are delays and buyers are airline companies; the latter pay money to the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) to buy away the desired amount of delay on a per flight basis. We give a notion of equilibrium for this market and an LP whose every optimal solution gives an equilibrium alloc...

We consider the problem of coordinating the exchange of real-time information among multiple agents. For example, a US Department of Transportation pilot program seeks to reduce tra c accidents by allowing each vehicle to request and send crash-relevant information (e.g. position, speed, braking status) from and to neighboring vehicles. Time is of the essence: vehicle information becomes stale ...

This paper extends previous research on congested service facilities to generalized service distributions, a significant extension given the limitations of exponential distributions for networked computer job modeling. Building on the framework first presented in Mendelson and Whang (1990), we present fundamental theorems for non-priority M/G/1 queues, nonpreemptive M/G/1 queues, and preemptive...

The lemmas in Appendix C.2 show how requirements R1–R6 are driven by group strategy-proofness and Pareto efficiency. The following examples further illustrate the role of the consistency requirements R4–R6. Requirement R4 is needed to ensure the individual strategy-proofness of the TC mechanisms. This requirement is also needed to ensure the individual strategyproofness of the TTC mechanisms, a...

As many as 30% of all files shared on public BitTorrent networks suffer from the lack of “seeders” (peers that have complete copies of the file being shared); peers attempting to download such a file (“leechers”) may have to wait indefinitely to obtain certain file chunks that are not distributed in the file’s network of peers (the “swarm”). We call this the Blocked Leecher Problem (BLP). To al...

We commonly use the experience of others when taking decisions. Reputation mechanisms aggregate in a formal way the feedback collected from peers and compute the reputation of products, services, or providers. The success of reputation mechanisms is however conditioned on obtaining true feedback. Side-payments (i.e. agents get paid for submitting feedback) can make honest reporting rational (i....