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A Faithful Mechanism for Privacy-Sensitive Distributed Constraint Satisfaction Problems

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Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNAI,volume 12520))

Abstract

We consider a constraint satisfaction problem (CSP) in which constraints are distributed among multiple privacy-sensitive agents. Agents are self-interested (they may reveal misleading information/constraints if that increases their benefits) and privacy-sensitive (they prefer to reveal as little information as possible). For this setting, we design a multi-round negotiation-based incentive mechanism that guarantees truthful behavior of the agents, while protecting them against unreasonable leakage of information. This mechanism possesses several desirable properties, including Bayesian incentive compatibility and individual rationality. Specifically, we prove that our mechanism is faithful, meaning that no agent can benefit by deviating from his required actions in the mechanism. Therefore, the mechanism can be implemented by selfish agents themselves, with no need for a trusted party to gather the information and make the decisions centrally.

This work was supported and funded by Samsung Electronics R&D Institute UK (SRUK).

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Notes

  1. 1.

    This leak of information may enable responders to collude with each other to alter the outcome in their favor.

  2. 2.

    It is clear that by this transformation, we have \(A'=A\).

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Correspondence to Farzaneh Farhadi .

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Farhadi, F., Jennings, N.R. (2020). A Faithful Mechanism for Privacy-Sensitive Distributed Constraint Satisfaction Problems. In: Bassiliades, N., Chalkiadakis, G., de Jonge, D. (eds) Multi-Agent Systems and Agreement Technologies. EUMAS AT 2020 2020. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 12520. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-66412-1_10

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-66412-1_10

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  • Print ISBN: 978-3-030-66411-4

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-030-66412-1

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