In the standard mechanism design framework, agents’ messages are gathered at a central point and allocation/tax functions are calculated in a centralized manner, i.e., as functions of all network agents’ messages. This requirement may cause communication and computation overhead and necessitates the design of mechanisms that alleviate this bottleneck. We consider a scenario where message transmission can only be performed locally so that the mechanism allocation/tax functions can be calculated in a decentralized manner. Each agent transmits messages to her local neighborhood, as defined by a given message-exchange network, and her allocation/tax functions are only functions of the available neighborhood messages. This scenario gives rise to a novel research problem that we call “distributed mechanism design.”In this paper, we propose two distributed mechanisms for network utility maximization problems that involve private and public goods with competition and cooperation between agents. As a concrete example, we use the problems of rate allocation in networks with either unicast or multirate multicast transmission protocols. The proposed mechanism for each of the protocols fully implements the optimal allocation in Nash equilibria, and its message space dimensionality scales linearly with respect to the number of agents in the network.

中文翻译：

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网络资源分配问题的分布式机制设计

在标准机制设计框架中，代理的消息集中在一个中心点，分配/税收函数以集中方式计算，即作为所有网络代理消息的函数。此要求可能会导致通信和计算开销，并且需要设计缓解此瓶颈的机制。我们考虑一种只能在本地执行消息传输的场景，以便可以以分散的方式计算机制分配/税收函数。每个代理向她的本地邻居发送消息，如给定的消息交换网络所定义，并且她的分配/税收函数只是可用邻居消息的函数。这种情况产生了一个新的研究问题，我们称之为“分布式机制设计”。在本文中，我们为网络效用最大化问题提出了两种分布式机制，涉及私人和公共物品以及代理之间的竞争与合作。作为一个具体的例子，我们使用单播或多速率多播传输协议的网络中的速率分配问题。为每个协议提出的机制完全实现了纳什均衡中的最优分配，并且其消息空间维度相对于网络中的代理数量线性缩放。