Under many distributed protocols, the prescribed behavior for participants is to behave greedily, i.e., to repeatedly“best respond” to the others’ actions. We present recent work (Proc. ICS’11 ) where we tackle the following general question: “When is it best for a long-sighted participant to adhere to a distributed greedy protocol?”. We take a game-theoretic approach and exhibit a class of gam...

Our research is concerned with the study and development of incentive-compatible exchange mechanisms for recommendations in a multiagent system. These mechanism will allow and motivate agents to create an economy of ideas, where agents trade recommendations between themselves. In this paper we present a domain model and an incentivecompatible protocol for information exchange. Our model capture...

The complexity of modern networks calls for decentralized control schemes where each user makes its control decisions independently based on some individual performance objectives. The operating points of such noncooperative networks are the Nash equilibria of the underlying control game. Nash equilibria are generically inefficient and lead to suboptimal network performance. Using routing as a ...

We consider the problem of eliciting truthful responses to a survey question, when the respondents share a common prior about which the survey planner is agnostic. The planner would therefore like to have a universal mechanism, which would induce honest answers for all possible priors. If the planner also requires a locality condition that ensures that the mechanism payoffs are determined by th...

In this comment we argue that the experimental evidence provided by Cummings et al. is not inconsistent with hypothetical referenda being an incentive compatible mechanism for eliciting economic values. Differences in response proportions between hypothetical and real referenda can be expected if the underlying distributions have equal means but differ in scale. Once rescaled, Cummings et al.’s...

The selection problem of m highest ranked out of n candidates is considered for a model while the relative ranking of two candidates is obtained through their pairwise comparison. Deviating from the standard model, it is assumed in this article that the outcome of a pairwise comparison may be manipulated by the two participants. The higher ranked party may intentionally lose to the lower ranked...

We characterize methods of dividing a cake between two bidders in a way that is incentive-compatible and Pareto-efficient. In our cake cutting model, each bidder desires a subset of the cake (with a uniform value over this subset), and is allocated some subset. Our characterization proceeds via reducing to a simple one-dimensional version of the problem, and yields, for example, a tight bound o...

We consider general social choice environments with private values and correlated types. Each agent’s matrix of conditional probabilities satisfies the full rank condition. We show that for any Bayesian incentive compatible mechanism there exists a dominant strategy incentive compatible mechanism that delivers the same interim expected utilities to all agents and generates at least the same soc...

We consider the performance and incentive compatibility of voting rules in a Bayesian environment with independent private values and at least three alternatives. It is shown that every (ex-ante) Pareto efficient ordinal rule among neutral rules is incentive compatible under a symmetry assumption on alternatives. Furthermore, we prove that there exists an incentive compatible cardinal rule whic...

This paper studies allocation problems with and without monetary transfers, such as multi-unit auctions, school choice, and course assignment. For this class of problems, we introduce a generalized random priority mechanism with budgets (GRP). This mechanism is always ex post incentive compatible and feasible. Moreover, as the market grows large, this mechanism can approximate any incentive com...