Of Mechanism Design and Multiagent Planning

Multiagent planning methods are concerned with planning by and for a group of agents. If the agents are selfinterested, they may be tempted to lie in order to obtain an outcome that is more rewarding for them. We therefore study the multiagent planning problem from a mechanism design perspective, showing how to incentivise agents to be truthful. We prove that the well-known truthful VCG mechanism is not always truthful in the context of optimal planning, and present a modi cation to x this. Finally, we present some (domain-dependent) poly-time planning algorithms using this x that maintain truthfulness in spite of their non-optimality.

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