Abstract
We consider a problem at the intersection of distributed computing and game theory, namely: Is it possible to achieve the “windfall of malice” even without the actual presence of malicious players? Our answer to this question is “Yes and No”. Our positive result is that for the virus inoculation game, it is possible to achieve the windfall of malice by use of a mediator. Our negative result is that for symmetric congestion games that are known to have a windfall of malice, it is not possible to design a mediator that achieves this windfall. In proving these two results, we develop novel techniques for mediator design that we believe will be helpful for creating non-trivial mediators to improve social welfare in a large class of games.
This research was partially supported by: for the 1st. 2nd authors, the FP7-ICT-21527 (FRONTS) and the TIN2007-66523 (FORMALISM), for the 3rd. and 4th. authors by NSF CAREER Award 0644058, NSF CCR-0313160, and an AFOSR MURI grant.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
Similar content being viewed by others
References
Abraham, I., Dolev, D., Gonen, R., Halper, J.: Distributed Computing Meets Game Theory: Robust mechanisms for rational secret sharing and multiparty computation. In: Principles of Distributed Computing, PODC (2006)
Aspnes, J., Chang, K., Yampolskiy, A.: Inoculation strategies for victims of viruses and the sum-of-squares partition problem. In: Symposium on Discrete Algorithms, SODA (2005)
Aumann, R.: Subjectivity and correlation in randomized games. Mathematical Economics 1, 67–96 (1974)
Babaioff, M., Kleinberg, R., Papadimitriou, C.H.: Congestion games with malicious players. In: ACM Conference on Electronic Commerce (2007)
Balcan, M., Blum, A., Mansour, Y.: Improved equilibria via public service advertising. In: ACM Symposium on Discrete Algorithms, SODA (2009)
Christodoulou, G., Koutsoupias, E.: On the price of anarchy and stability of correlated equilibria of linear congetion games. In: Brodal, G.S., Leonardi, S. (eds.) ESA 2005. LNCS, vol. 3669, pp. 59–70. Springer, Heidelberg (2005)
Moscibroda, T., Schmid, S., Wattenhofer, R.: When selfish meets evil: Byzantine players in a virus inoculation game. In: Principles of Distributed Computing, PODC (2006)
Papadimitriou, C., Roughgarden, T.: Computing correlated equilibria in multi-player games. Journal of the ACM (JACM) 5(14) (2008)
Roth, A.: The price of malice in linear congestion games. In: Papadimitriou, C., Zhang, S. (eds.) WINE 2008. LNCS, vol. 5385, pp. 118–125. Springer, Heidelberg (2008)
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2009 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg
About this paper
Cite this paper
Díaz, J., Mitsche, D., Rustagi, N., Saia, J. (2009). On the Power of Mediators. In: Leonardi, S. (eds) Internet and Network Economics. WINE 2009. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 5929. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-10841-9_42
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-10841-9_42
Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg
Print ISBN: 978-3-642-10840-2
Online ISBN: 978-3-642-10841-9
eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)