Reasoning about knowledge
Towards a general theory of non-cooperative computation
Proceedings of the 9th conference on Theoretical aspects of rationality and knowledge
Rational secret sharing and multiparty computation: extended abstract
STOC '04 Proceedings of the thirty-sixth annual ACM symposium on Theory of computing
EC '06 Proceedings of the 7th ACM conference on Electronic commerce
Learning algorithms for online principal-agent problems (and selling goods online)
ICML '06 Proceedings of the 23rd international conference on Machine learning
Mechanisms for information elicitation
Artificial Intelligence
Automated design of multistage mechanisms
IJCAI'07 Proceedings of the 20th international joint conference on Artifical intelligence
Sequential-simultaneous information elicitation in multi-agent systems
IJCAI'05 Proceedings of the 19th international joint conference on Artificial intelligence
WINE'05 Proceedings of the First international conference on Internet and Network Economics
| Hi-index | 0.00 |
We introduce the study of sequential information elicitation in strategic multi-agent systems. In an information elicitation setup a center attempts to compute the value of a function based on private information (a-k-a secrets) accessible to a set of agents. We consider the classical multi-party computation setup where each agent is interested in knowing the result of the function. However, in our setting each agent is strategic, and since acquiring information is costly, an agent may be tempted not spending the efforts of obtaining the information, free-riding on other agents' computations. A mechanism which elicits agents' secrets and performs the desired computation defines a game. A mechanism is 'appropriate' if there exists an equilibrium in which it is able to elicit (sufficiently many) agents' secrets and perform the computation, for all possible secret vectors. We characterize a general efficient procedure for determining an appropriate mechanism, if such mechanism exists. Moreover, we also address the existence problem, providing a polynomial algorithm for verifying the existence of an appropriate mechanism.