Overcoming Free Riding in Multi-Party Computations - The Anonymous Case

Posted: 7 Mar 2012

See all articles by Rann Smorodinsky

Rann Smorodinsky

Technion-Israel Institute of Technology - The William Davidson Faculty of Industrial Engineering & Management

Moshe Tennenholtz

Technion-Israel Institute of Technology - The William Davidson Faculty of Industrial Engineering & Management

Date Written: March 7, 2012

Abstract

This paper addresses the question of multi-party computation in a model with asymmetric information. Each agent has a private value (secret), but in contrast to standard models, the agent incurs a cost when retrieving the secret. There is a social choice function the agents would like to compute and implement. All agents would like to perform a joint computation, which input is their vector of secrets. However, agents would like to free-ride on others’ contribution.

A mechanism which elicits players’ secrets and performs the desired computation defines a game. A mechanism is ‘appropriate’ if it (weakly) implements the social choice function for all secret vectors. namely, 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 show that ‘appropriate’ mechanisms approach agents sequentially and that they have low communication complexity.

Keywords: multi-party computations, sequential mechanisms, equilibrium, revelation principle, information acquisition

JEL Classification: C72, C80, D70, D82

Suggested Citation

Smorodinsky, Rann and Tennenholtz, Moshe, Overcoming Free Riding in Multi-Party Computations - The Anonymous Case (March 7, 2012). Games and Economic Behavior, Vol. 55, 2006, Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=2017450

Rann Smorodinsky (Contact Author)

Technion-Israel Institute of Technology - The William Davidson Faculty of Industrial Engineering & Management ( email )

Haifa 32000
Israel

Moshe Tennenholtz

Technion-Israel Institute of Technology - The William Davidson Faculty of Industrial Engineering & Management ( email )

Bloomfield-312
Haifa 32000
Israel
972-4-829 4419 (Phone)

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