Sybil-proof Answer Querying Mechanism

Sybil-proof Answer Querying Mechanism

Yao Zhang, Xiuzhen Zhang, Dengji Zhao

Proceedings of the Twenty-Ninth International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence
Main track. Pages 422-428. https://doi.org/10.24963/ijcai.2020/59

We study a question answering problem on a social network, where a requester is seeking an answer from the agents on the network. The goal is to design reward mechanisms to incentivize the agents to propagate the requester's query to their neighbours if they don't have the answer. Existing mechanisms are vulnerable to Sybil-attacks, i.e., an agent may get more reward by creating fake identities. Hence, we combat this problem by first proving some impossibility results to resolve Sybil-attacks and then characterizing a class of mechanisms which satisfy Sybil-proofness (prevents Sybil-attacks) as well as other desirable properties. Except for Sybil-proofness, we also consider cost minimization for the requester and agents' collusions.
Keywords:
Agent-based and Multi-agent Systems: Algorithmic Game Theory
Agent-based and Multi-agent Systems: Economic Paradigms, Auctions and Market-Based Systems
Agent-based and Multi-agent Systems: Noncooperative Games