Sequential Information Elicitation in Multi-Agent Systems

TL;DR

This paper studies how to design mechanisms in multi-agent systems that incentivize strategic agents to truthfully reveal private information, ensuring accurate computation despite costs and free-riding tendencies.

Contribution

It introduces a framework for sequential information elicitation, characterizes conditions for appropriate mechanisms, and provides polynomial algorithms for their existence verification.

Findings

Characterizes when appropriate mechanisms exist.

Provides an efficient procedure to determine appropriate mechanisms.

Offers a polynomial algorithm to verify mechanism existence.

Abstract

We introduce the study of sequential information elicitation in strategic multi-agent systems. In an information elicitation setup a center attempts to compute the value of a function based on private information (a-k-a secrets) accessible to a set of agents. We consider the classical multi-party computation setup where each agent is interested in knowing the result of the function. However, in our setting each agent is strategic,and since acquiring information is costly, an agent may be tempted not spending the efforts of obtaining the information, free-riding on other agents' computations. A mechanism which elicits agents' secrets and performs the desired computation defines a game. A mechanism is 'appropriate' if there exists an equilibrium in which it is able to elicit (sufficiently many) agents' secrets and perform the computation, for all possible secret vectors.We characterize a general efficient procedure for determining an appropriate mechanism, if such mechanism exists. Moreover, we also address the existence problem, providing a polynomial algorithm for verifying the existence of an appropriate mechanism.