Efficient Task Collaboration with Execution Uncertainty

We study a general task allocation problem, involving multiple agents that collaboratively accomplish tasks and where agents may fail to successfully complete the tasks assigned to them (known as execution uncertainty). The goal is to choose an allocation that maximises social welfare while taking their execution uncertainty into account. We show that this can be achieved by using the post-execution verification (PEV)-based mechanism if and only if agents' valuations satisfy a multilinearity condition. We then consider a more complex setting where an agent's execution uncertainty is not completely predictable by the agent alone but aggregated from all agents' private opinions (known as trust). We show that PEV-based mechanism with trust is still truthfully implementable if and only if the trust aggregation is multilinear.

[1]  R. Belk.  You are what you can access: Sharing and collaborative consumption online , 2014 .

[2]  Vincent Conitzer,et al.  Mechanism Design for Scheduling with Uncertain Execution Time , 2014, AAAI.

[3]  Nicholas R. Jennings,et al.  Algorithms and mechanisms for procuring services with uncertain durations using redundancy , 2011, Artif. Intell..

[4]  Moshe Tennenholtz,et al.  Mechanism design with uncertain inputs: (to err is human, to forgive divine) , 2011, STOC '11.

[5]  Tim Roughgarden,et al.  Algorithmic Game Theory , 2007 .

[6]  Juhnyoung Lee,et al.  A view of cloud computing , 2010, CACM.

[7]  Sarvapali D. Ramchurn,et al.  Trust-Based Mechanisms for Robust and Efficient Task Allocation in the Presence of Execution Uncertainty , 2009, J. Artif. Intell. Res..

[8]  Moshe Tennenholtz,et al.  Fault tolerant mechanism design , 2008, Artif. Intell..

[9]  Karl Aberer,et al.  Managing trust in a peer-2-peer information system , 2001, CIKM '01.

[10]  B. Moldovanu,et al.  Efficient Design with Interdependent Valuations , 2001 .

[11]  N. Nisan,et al.  Algorithmic Mechanism Design , 2001, Games Econ. Behav..

[12]  Noam Nisan,et al.  Computationally feasible VCG mechanisms , 2000, EC '00.

[13]  E. Stacchetti,et al.  Multidimensional Mechanism Design for Auctions with Externalities , 1999 .

[14]  Tuomas Sandholm,et al.  An Implementation of the Contract Net Protocol Based on Marginal Cost Calculations , 1993, AAAI.

[15]  Paul R. Milgrom,et al.  A theory of auctions and competitive bidding , 1982 .

[16]  Theodore Groves,et al.  Incentives in Teams , 1973 .

[17]  S. Basov,et al.  The Revelation Principle , 2016 .

[18]  Umang Bhaskar,et al.  Routing games , 2012 .

[19]  Yves Sprumont,et al.  Sharing the cost of a public good: An incentive-constrained axiomatic approach , 2010, Games Econ. Behav..