A Distributed Platform for Mechanism Design

TL;DR

This paper presents a layered distributed platform for mechanism design that supports fault-tolerance, manipulation prevention, and distributed policing, with implementation in Java and various example applications.

Contribution

It introduces a flexible, layered architecture for distributed mechanism design, integrating fault-tolerance and security features, and demonstrates its implementation and applications.

Findings

Supports fault-tolerance and manipulation prevention

Enables distributed policing mechanisms

Successfully implemented in Java with example applications

Abstract

We describe a structured system for distributed mechanism design. It consists of a sequence of layers. The lower layers deal with the operations relevant for distributed computing only, while the upper layers are concerned only with communication among players, including broadcasting and multicasting, and distributed decision making. This yields a highly flexible distributed system whose specific applications are realized as instances of its top layer. This design supports fault-tolerance, prevents manipulations and makes it possible to implement distributed policing. The system is implemented in Java. We illustrate it by discussing a number of implemented examples.