Verifiably Truthful Mechanisms

TL;DR

This paper introduces a framework for designing mechanisms whose truthfulness can be efficiently verified, demonstrated through a case study in facility location problems without monetary transfers.

Contribution

It proposes a novel approach to create verifiably truthful mechanisms with an efficient verification process, advancing the reliability of mechanism design.

Findings

Verification algorithms for truthful mechanisms are feasible.

The approach applies to facility location problems without money.

Mechanisms can be both approximately optimal and verifiably truthful.

Abstract

It is typically expected that if a mechanism is truthful, then the agents would, indeed, truthfully report their private information. But why would an agent believe that the mechanism is truthful? We wish to design truthful mechanisms, whose truthfulness can be verified efficiently (in the computational sense). Our approach involves three steps: (i) specifying the structure of mechanisms, (ii) constructing a verification algorithm, and (iii) measuring the quality of verifiably truthful mechanisms. We demonstrate this approach using a case study: approximate mechanism design without money for facility location.