Mechanism design has traditionally assumed that the set of participants are fixed and known to the mechanism (the market owner) in advance. However, in practice, the market owner can only directly reach a small number of participants (her neighbours). Hence the owner often needs costly promotions to recruit more participants in order to get desirable outcomes such as social welfare or revenue maximization. In this paper, we propose to incentivize existing participants to invite their neighbours to attract more participants. However, they would not invite each other if they are competitors. We discuss how to utilize the conflict of interest between the participants to incentivize them to invite each other to form larger markets. We will highlight the early solutions and open the floor for discussing the fundamental open questions in the settings of auctions, coalitional games, matching and voting.

中文翻译：

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社会互动推动的机制设计

传统上，机制设计假定参与者的集合是固定的，并且是机制（市场所有者）事先知道的。但是，实际上，市场所有者只能直接与少数参与者（她的邻居）接触。因此，所有者通常需要昂贵的促销活动来招募更多的参与者，以获得理想的结果，例如社会福利或收入最大化。在本文中，我们建议激励现有的参与者，邀请他们的邻居吸引更多的参与者。但是，如果他们是竞争对手，他们不会互相邀请。我们讨论了如何利用参与者之间的利益冲突来激励他们相互邀请以形成更大的市场。