On Incentivizing Social Information Sharing Through Routing Games
Songhua Li, Lingjie Duan

TL;DR
This paper models social information sharing as a routing game, analyzes inefficiencies of selfish behavior, and proposes incentive mechanisms that significantly improve social welfare while maintaining practical properties.
Contribution
It introduces novel incentive mechanisms, AIR and ASP, for routing games with social externalities, achieving improved price of anarchy and practical implementation.
Findings
AIR reduces non-cooperative access to the public good, achieving PoA=1/4.
ASP uses adaptive side-payments, achieving PoA=1/2.
Theoretical results are validated with real-world dataset experiments.
Abstract
Crowdsourcing services, such as Waze, leverage a mass of mobile users to learn massive point-of-interest (PoI) information while traveling and share it as a public good. Given that crowdsourced users mind their travel costs and possess various preferences over the PoI information along different paths, we formulate the problem as a novel non-atomic multi-path routing game with positive network externalities among users in social information sharing. In the absence of any incentive design, our price of anarchy (PoA) analysis shows that users' selfish routing on the path with the lowest cost will limit information diversity and lead to with an arbitrarily large efficiency loss from the social optimum. This motivates us to design effective incentive mechanisms to remedy while upholding desirable properties such as individual rationality, incentive compatibility, and budget…
Peer Reviews
No public reviews on file for this paper yet. If you reviewed it on a platform where reviews are public (OpenReview, ICLR, NeurIPS, ICML), you can paste yours below so the community can read it here.
Videos
No videos yet. Explain this paper in a talk, walkthrough, or lecture? Add one.
Taxonomy
TopicsPeer-to-Peer Network Technologies · Caching and Content Delivery · Multimedia Communication and Technology
