Mechanism Design Powered by Social Interactions: A Call to Arms
Proceedings of the Thirty-First International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence
Early Career. Pages 5831-5835.
https://doi.org/10.24963/ijcai.2022/820
Mechanism design has traditionally assumed that the participants are fixed and independent. However, in reality, the participants are well-connected (e.g., via their social networks) and we can utilize their connections to power the design. One interesting trend is to incentivize the existing participants to use their connections to invite new participants. This helps to form larger games in auctions, coalitional games, matching etc., which is not achievable with the traditional solutions. The challenge is that the participants are competitors and they would not invite each other by default. Solving this is well-coupled with the existing challenges. For example, in auctions, solving it may require revenue monotonicity and false-name-proofness, which were proved impossible to achieve under certain sensible conditions. In matching, this cannot get along with standard optimality and stability. Hence, we believe there is an important theoretical value to discover and the study will stimulate many interesting applications, especially under decentralized systems with blockchain.
Keywords:
EC: Mechanism Design
EC: Game Theory And Economic Paradigms
EC: Multi-agent Systems