Correction to "An Efficient Game Form for Unicast Service Provisioning"

A correction to the specification of the mechanism proposed in "An Efficient Game Form for Unicast Service Provisioning" is given

Generalized Proportional Allocation Mechanism Design for Unicast Service on the Internet

In this report we construct two mechanisms that fully implement social welfare maximising allocation in Nash equilibria for the case of a single infinitely divisible good subject to multiple inequality constraints. The first mechanism achieves weak budget balance, while the second is an extension of the first, and achieves strong budget balance. One important application of this mechanism is unicast service on the Internet where a network operator wishes to allocate rates among strategic users in such a way that maximise overall user satisfaction while respecting capacity constraints on every link in the network. The emphasis of this work is on full implementation, which means that all Nash equilibria of the induced game result in the optimal allocations of the centralized allocation problem.Comment: arXiv admin note: text overlap with arXiv:1307.256

A General Mechanism Design Methodology for Social Utility Maximization with Linear Constraints

Social utility maximization refers to the process of allocating resources in such a way that the sum of agents' utilities is maximized under the system constraints. Such allocation arises in several problems in the general area of communications, including unicast (and multicast multi-rate) service on the Internet, as well as in applications with (local) public goods, such as power allocation in wireless networks, spectrum allocation, etc. Mechanisms that implement such allocations in Nash equilibrium have also been studied but either they do not possess full implementation property, or are given in a case-by-case fashion, thus obscuring fundamental understanding of these problems. In this paper we propose a unified methodology for creating mechanisms that fully implement, in Nash equilibria, social utility maximizing functions arising in various contexts where the constraints are convex. The construction of the mechanism is done in a systematic way by considering the dual optimization problem. In addition to the required properties of efficiency and individual rationality that such mechanisms ought to satisfy, three additional design goals are the focus of this paper: a) the size of the message space scaling linearly with the number of agents (even if agents' types are entire valuation functions), b) allocation being feasible on and off equilibrium, and c) strong budget balance at equilibrium and also off equilibrium whenever demand is feasible

Mechanism design for resource allocation in networks with intergroup competition and intragroup sharing

We consider a network where strategic agents, who are contesting for allocation of resources, are divided into fixed groups. The network control protocol is such that within each group agents get to share the resource and across groups they contest for it. A prototypical example is the allocation of data rate on a network with multicast/multirate architecture. Compared to the unicast architecture (which is a special case), the multicast/multirate architecture can result in substantial bandwidth savings. However, design of a market mechanism in such a scenario requires dealing with both private and public good problems as opposed to just private goods in unicast. The mechanism proposed in this work ensures that social welfare maximizing allocation on such a network is realized at all Nash equilibria (NE) i.e., full implementation in NE. In addition it is individually rational, i.e., agents have an incentive to participate in the mechanism. The mechanism, which is constructed in a quasi-systematic way starting from the dual of the centralized problem, has a number of useful properties. Specifically, due to a novel allocation scheme, namely "radial projection", the proposed mechanism results in feasible allocation even off equilibrium. This is a practical necessity for any realistic mechanism since agents have to "learn" the NE through a dynamic process. Finally, it is shown how strong budget balance at equilibrium can be achieved with a minimal increase in message space as an add-on to a weakly budget balanced mechanism.Comment: Technical repor