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Evolutionary mechanism design: a review

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Abstract

The advent of large-scale distributed systems poses unique engineering challenges. In open systems such as the internet it is not possible to prescribe the behaviour of all of the components of the system in advance. Rather, we attempt to design infrastructure, such as network protocols, in such a way that the overall system is robust despite the fact that numerous arbitrary, non-certified, third-party components can connect to our system. Economists have long understood this issue, since it is analogous to the design of the rules governing auctions and other marketplaces, in which we attempt to achieve socially-desirable outcomes despite the impossibility of prescribing the exact behaviour of the market participants, who may attempt to subvert the market for their own personal gain. This field is known as “mechanism design”: the science of designing rules of a game to achieve a specific outcome, even though each participant may be self-interested. Although it originated in economics, mechanism design has become an important foundation of multi-agent systems (MAS) research. In a traditional mechanism design problem, analytical methods are used to prove that agents’ game-theoretically optimal strategies lead to socially desirable outcomes. In many scenarios, traditional mechanism design and auction theory yield clear-cut results; however, there are many situations in which the underlying assumptions of the theory are violated due to the messiness of the real-world. In this paper we review alternative approaches to mechanism design which treat it as an engineering problem and bring to bear engineering design principles, viz.: iterative step-wise refinement of solutions, and satisficing instead of optimization in the face of intractable complexity. We categorize these approaches under the banner of evolutionary mechanism design.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Centre for Computational Finance and Economic Agents (CCFEA), University of Essex, Wivenhoe Park, Colchester, CO4 3SQ, UK

    Steve Phelps

  2. Department of Computer Science, University of Liverpool, Liverpool, L69 3BX, UK

    Peter McBurney

  3. Department of Computer and Information Science, Brooklyn College, City University of New York, 2900 Bedford Avenue, Brooklyn, NY, 11210, USA

    Simon Parsons

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Correspondence to Steve Phelps.

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We are grateful for financial support received from the UK EPSRC through the Market-Based Control of Complex Computational Systems Project (GR/T10657/01), and from the US National Science Foundation under grant NSF IIS-0329037 Tools and Techniques for Automated Mechanism Design.

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Phelps, S., McBurney, P. & Parsons, S. Evolutionary mechanism design: a review. Auton Agent Multi-Agent Syst 21, 237–264 (2010). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10458-009-9108-7

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