Mechanism Design with Execution Uncertainty

TL;DR

This paper extends mechanism design to account for execution uncertainty, introducing fault tolerant mechanisms that handle agents' failure probabilities, with both positive and negative theoretical results.

Contribution

It formalizes fault tolerant mechanism design, providing new incentive-compatible mechanisms and impossibility results under execution uncertainty.

Findings

Existence of incentive-compatible, individually rational, efficient mechanisms.

Impossibility theorems for certain task allocation settings.

Technical results for various instances of fault tolerant mechanisms.

Abstract

We introduce the notion of fault tolerant mechanism design, which extends the standard game theoretic framework of mechanism design to allow for uncertainty about execution. Specifically, we define the problem of task allocation in which the private information of the agents is not only their costs to attempt the tasks, but also their probabilities of failure. For several different instances of this setting we present technical results, including positive ones in the form of mechanisms that are incentive compatible, individually rational and efficient, and negative ones in the form of impossibility theorems.