Game-Theoretically Secure Distributed Protocols for Fair Allocation in Coalitional Games

TL;DR

This paper develops game-theoretically secure distributed protocols for approximating the Shapley value in coalition games, ensuring fairness and security even with adversarial players and limited resources.

Contribution

It introduces a new approach to secure permutation sampling for Shapley value approximation, providing bounds and empirical validation under adversarial conditions.

Findings

Guarantees honest players' rewards close to Shapley value

Provides upper bounds on permutation samples for security

Empirically verifies theoretical results with experiments

Abstract

We consider game-theoretically secure distributed protocols for coalition games that approximate the Shapley value with small multiplicative error. Since all known existing approximation algorithms for the Shapley value are randomized, it is a challenge to design efficient distributed protocols among mutually distrusted players when there is no central authority to generate unbiased randomness. The game-theoretic notion of maximin security has been proposed to offer guarantees to an honest player's reward even if all other players are susceptible to an adversary. Permutation sampling is often used in approximation algorithms for the Shapley value. A previous work in 1994 by Zlotkin et al. proposed a simple constant-round distributed permutation generation protocol based on commitment scheme, but it is vulnerable to rushing attacks. The protocol, however, can detect such attacks. In this work, we model the limited resources of an adversary by a violation budget that determines how many times it can perform such detectable attacks. Therefore, by repeating the number of permutation samples, an honest player's reward can be guaranteed to be close to its Shapley value. We explore both high probability and expected maximin security. We obtain an upper bound on the number of permutation samples for high probability maximin security, even with an unknown violation budget. Furthermore, we establish a matching lower bound for the weaker notion of expected maximin security in specific permutation generation protocols. We have also performed experiments on both synthetic and real data to empirically verify our results.