Trade of a problem-solving task
AAMAS '03 Proceedings of the second international joint conference on Autonomous agents and multiagent systems
Brain Meets Brawn: Why Grid and Agents Need Each Other
AAMAS '04 Proceedings of the Third International Joint Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems - Volume 1
AAMAS '04 Proceedings of the Third International Joint Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems - Volume 2
Eliciting Informative Feedback: The Peer-Prediction Method
Management Science
Flexible service provisioning with advance agreements
Proceedings of the 7th international joint conference on Autonomous agents and multiagent systems - Volume 1
Fault tolerant mechanism design
Artificial Intelligence
A Truthful Two-Stage Mechanism for Eliciting Probabilistic Estimates with Unknown Costs
Proceedings of the 2008 conference on ECAI 2008: 18th European Conference on Artificial Intelligence
Algorithms and mechanisms for procuring services with uncertain durations using redundancy
Artificial Intelligence
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In this paper, we consider the problem where an agent wishes to complete a single computational task, but lacks the required resources. Instead, it must contract self-interested service providers, who are able to flexibly manipulate the quality of service they deliver, in order to maximise their own utility. We extend an existing model to allow for multiple such service providers to be contracted for the same task, and derive optimal task procurement mechanisms in the setting where the agent has full knowledge of the cost functions of these service providers (considering both simultaneous and sequential procurement). We then extend these results to the incomplete information setting where the agent must elicit cost information from the service providers, and we characterise a family of incentive-compatible and individually-rational mechanisms. We show empirically that sequential procurement always generates greater utility for the agent compared to simultaneous procurement, and that over a range of settings, contracting multiple providers is preferable to contracting just one.