No abstract

In the standard Mechanism Design framework, agents' messages are gathered at a central point and allocation/tax functions are calculated in a centralized manner, i.e., as functions of all network agents' messages. This requirement may cause communication and computation overhead and necessitates the design of mechanisms that alleviate this bottleneck.We consider a scenario where message transmission can only be performed locally so that the mechanism allocation/tax functions can be calculated in a decentralized manner. Each agent transmits messages to her local neighborhood, as defined by a given message-exchange network, and her allocation/tax functions are only functions of the available neighborhood messages. This scenario gives rise to a novel research problem that we call "Distributed Mechanism Design".In this paper, we propose two distributed mechanisms for network utility maximization problems that involve private and public goods with competition and cooperation between agents. As a concrete example, we use the problems of rate allocation in networks with either unicast or multirate multicast transmission protocols. The proposed mechanism for each of the protocols fully implements the optimal allocation in Nash equilibria and its message space dimensionality scales linearly with respect to the number of agents in the network. general area of communication and information theory, with emphasis in channel coding and multi-user channels; control theory with emphasis in decentralized stochastic control and its connections to communications and information theoretic problems; analysis of dynamic games and mechanism design for resource allocation on networked systems.

In the standard Mechanism Design framework (Hurwicz-Reiter [1]), there is a central authority that gathers agents' messages and subsequently determines the allocation and tax for each agent. We consider a scenario where, due to communication overhead and other constraints, such broadcasting of messages to a central authority cannot take place. Instead, only local message exchange is allowed between agents. As a result, each agent should be able to determine her own allocation and tax based on the messages in the local neighborhood, as defined by a given message graph describing the communication constraints. This scenario gives rise to a novel research direction that we call "Distributed Mechanism Design". In this paper, we propose such a distributed mechanism for the problem of rate allocation in a multicast transmission network. The proposed mechanism fully implements the optimal allocation in Nash equilibria and its message space dimension is linear with respect to the number of agents in the network.

No abstract

No abstract