Complexity of Mechanism Design机制的设计的复杂性.pptVIP

Complexity of Mechanism Design Automated mechanism design Mechanism design = designing rules of game so that a good outcome happens although agents play strategically Idea: Solve mechanism design as an optimization problem automatically Inputs: outcomes, type space, prior, designer’s objective Output: optimal mechanism Creating a mechanism for the specific setting (instance) at hand rather than a class of settings Advantages: Can circumvent impossibility results Can be used even in settings that do not satisfy the assumptions of canonical mechanisms (e.g. quasilinear utility functions) Can lead to a greater value of the mechanism designer’s objective (or stronger notions of nonmanipulability) than canonical mechanisms Often designer has info about agents - silly to ignore Mechanism design In multiagent systems, agents may have conflicting preferences over different outcomes that can be chosen Preference aggregation works as follows: The agents report their preferences (types); Then, the preference aggregator chooses an outcome on the basis of the reported types. Unfortunately, na?ve preference aggregation leads to false revelations (manipulation) E.g. claiming that an outcome is extremely valuable to you though in reality you only prefer it slightly Mechanism design is the study of selecting outcome functions which aggregate the preferences in a desirable way while avoiding manipulation Why restrict attention to nonmanipulable mechanisms? It is conceivable that there exists a mechanism that Is manipulable, but Leads to more desirable outcomes that any nonmanipulable mechanism, even when taking manipulation into account The Revelation Principle states this never happens: equally good nonmanipulable mechanisms can easily be found Take a manipulable mechanism From this, construct a new mechanism with an interface layer between the agents and the old mechanism An agents reports its type to the interface layer The interface layer (mis)reports the type strategically t