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  4. M-DPOP: Faithful distributed implementation of efficient social choice problems
 
conference paper

M-DPOP: Faithful distributed implementation of efficient social choice problems

Petcu, Adrian  
•
Faltings, Boi  
•
Parkes, David C.
2008
Journal Of Artificial Intelligence Research
5th International Joint Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems

In the efficient social choice problem, the goal is to assign values, subject to side constraints, to a set of variables to maximize the total utility across a population of agents, where each agent has private information about its utility function. In this paper we model the social choice problem as a distributed constraint optimization problem (DCOP), in which each agent can communicate with other agents that share an interest in one or more variables. Whereas existing DCOP algorithms can be easily manipulated by an agent, either by misreporting private information or deviating from the algorithm, we introduce M-DPOP, the first DCOP algorithm that provides a faithful distributed implementation for efficient social choice. This provides a concrete example of how the methods of mechanism design can be unified with those of distributed optimization. Faithfulness ensures that no agent can benefit by unilaterally deviating from any aspect of the protocol, neither information-revelation, computation, nor communication, and whatever the private information of other agents. We allow for payments by agents to a central bank, which is the only central authority that we require. To achieve faithfulness, we carefully integrate the Vickrey-Clarke-Groves (VCG) mechanism with the DPOP algorithm, such that each agent is only asked to perform computation, report information, and send messages that is in its own best interest. Determining agent i's payment requires solving the social choice problem without agent i. Here, we present a method to reuse computation performed in solving the main problem in a way that is robust against manipulation by the excluded agent. Experimental results on structured problems show that as much as 87% of the computation required for solving the marginal problems can be avoided by re-use, providing very good scalability in the number of agents. On unstructured problems, we observe a sensitivity of M-DPOP to the density of the problem, and we show that reusability decreases from almost 100% for very sparse problems to around 20% for highly connected problems. We close with a discussion of the features of DCOP that enable faithful implementations in this problem, the challenge of reusing computation from the main problem to marginal problems in other algorithms such as ADOPT and OptAPO, and the prospect of methods to avoid the welfare loss that can occur because of the transfer of payments to the bank.

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Type
conference paper
DOI
10.1613/jair.2500
Web of Science ID

WOS:000258181900001

Author(s)
Petcu, Adrian  
Faltings, Boi  
Parkes, David C.
Date Issued

2008

Published in
Journal Of Artificial Intelligence Research
Volume

32

Start page

705

End page

755

Subjects

Combinatorial Auctions

•

Contract Negotiation

•

Algorithm

•

Search

Editorial or Peer reviewed

REVIEWED

Written at

EPFL

EPFL units
LIA  
Event nameEvent placeEvent date
5th International Joint Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems

Hakodate, JAPAN

Jun 09, 2006

Available on Infoscience
November 30, 2010
Use this identifier to reference this record
https://infoscience.epfl.ch/handle/20.500.14299/61156
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