MDPOP: faithful distributed implementation of efficient social choice problems

We model social choice problems in which self interested agents with private utility functions have to agree on values for a set of variables subject to side constraints. The goal is to implement the efficient solution, maximizing the total utility across all agents. Existing techniques for this problem fall into two groups. Distributed constraint optimization algorithms can find the solution without any central authority but are vulnerable to manipulation. Incentive compatible mechanisms can ensure that agents report truthful information about their utilities and prevent manipulation of the outcome but require centralized computation.Following the agenda of distributed implementation [16], we integrate these methods and introduce MDPOP, the first distributed optimization protocol that faithfully implements the VCG mechanism for this problem of efficient social choice. No agent can benefit by unilaterally deviating from any aspect of the protocol, neither information-revelation, computation, nor communication. The only central authority required is a bank that can extract payments from agents. In addition, we exploit structure in the problem and develop a faithful method to redistribute some of the VCG payments back to agents. Agents need only communicate with other agents that have an interest in the same variable, and provided that the distributed optimization itself scales the entire method scales to problems of unbounded size.

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