Computational Mechanism Design: A Call to Arms

Game theory has developed powerful tools for analyzing decision making in systems with multiple autonomous actors. These tools, when tailored to computational settings, provide a foundation for building multiagent software systems. This tailoring gives rise to the field of computational mechanism design, which applies economic principles to computer systems design

Computer Science and Game Theory: A Brief Survey

There has been a remarkable increase in work at the interface of computer science and game theory in the past decade. In this article I survey some of the main themes of work in the area, with a focus on the work in computer science. Given the length constraints, I make no attempt at being comprehensive, especially since other surveys are also available, and a comprehensive survey book will appear shortly.Comment: To appear; Palgrave Dictionary of Economic

A Grey-Box Approach to Automated Mechanism Design

Auctions play an important role in electronic commerce, and have been used to solve problems in distributed computing. Automated approaches to designing effective auction mechanisms are helpful in reducing the burden of traditional game theoretic, analytic approaches and in searching through the large space of possible auction mechanisms. This paper presents an approach to automated mechanism design (AMD) in the domain of double auctions. We describe a novel parametrized space of double auctions, and then introduce an evolutionary search method that searches this space of parameters. The approach evaluates auction mechanisms using the framework of the TAC Market Design Game and relates the performance of the markets in that game to their constituent parts using reinforcement learning. Experiments show that the strongest mechanisms we found using this approach not only win the Market Design Game against known, strong opponents, but also exhibit desirable economic properties when they run in isolation.Comment: 18 pages, 2 figures, 2 tables, and 1 algorithm. Extended abstract to appear in the proceedings of AAMAS'201

Computational-Mechanism Design: A Call to Arms

Game theory has developed several powerful tools for analyzing decision making in systems composed of multiple autonomous actors. Given this fact, AI practitioners would like to exploit these tools when building software systems containing multiple agents. However, to do this, the tools must be tailored to computational settings. To this end, the authors provide an overview of computational-mechanism design, which deals with the application of economic principles in computer systems design. Moreover, because many complex systems are inherently distributed, they also present initial results from the relatively new field of distributed-computational-mechanism design and outline the key challenges involved in making the ideas practicable.Engineering and Applied Science

A theoretical and computational basis for CATNETS

The main content of this report is the identification and definition of market mechanisms for Application Layer Networks (ALNs). On basis of the structured Market Engineering process, the work comprises the identification of requirements which adequate market mechanisms for ALNs have to fulfill. Subsequently, two mechanisms for each, the centralized and the decentralized case are described in this document. These build the theoretical foundation for the work within the following two years of the CATNETS project. --Grid Computing

Environmental analysis for application layer networks

Die zunehmende Vernetzung von Rechnern über das Internet lies die Vision von Application Layer Netzwerken aufkommen. Sie umfassen Overlay Netzwerke wie beispielsweise Peer-to-Peer Netzwerke und Grid Infrastrukturen unter Verwendung des TCP/IP Protokolls. Ihre gemeinsame Eigenschaft ist die redundante, verteilte Bereitstellung und der Zugang zu Daten-, Rechen- und Anwendungsdiensten, während sie die Heterogenität der Infrastruktur vor dem Nutzer verbergen. In dieser Arbeit werden die Anforderungen, die diese Netzwerke an ökonomische Allokationsmechanismen stellen, untersucht. Die Analyse erfolgt anhand eines Marktanalyseprozesses für einen zentralen Auktionsmechanismus und einen katallaktischen Markt. --Grid Computing

Theoretical and Computational Basis for Economical Ressource Allocation in Application Layer Networks - Annual Report Year 1

This paper identifies and defines suitable market mechanisms for Application Layer Networks (ALNs). On basis of the structured Market Engineering process, the work comprises the identification of requirements which adequate market mechanisms for ALNs have to fulfill. Subsequently, two mechanisms for each, the centralized and the decentralized case are described in this document. --Grid Computing

Infrastructures to Engineer Open Agent Environments by Means of Electronic Institutions

Electronic institutions provide a computational analogue of human institutions to engineer open environments in which agents can interact in an autonomous way while complying with the norms of an institution. The purpose of this paper is twofold. On the one hand, we lightly survey our research on coordination infrastructures for electronic institutions in the last ten years. On the other hand, we highlight the research challenges in environment engineering that we have tackled during this journey as well as promising research paths for future research on the engineering of open environments for multi-agent systems.This paper has been partially funded by the following projects: TIN2012-38876-C02-01, PRAISE (FP7-318770), CollectiveMind (TEC2013-49430-EXP), ACE (Autonomic software engineering for online Cultural Experiences), and the Generalitat of Catalunya (2014 SGR 118)Peer reviewe

Interaction and communication among autonomous agents in multiagent systems

The main goal of this doctoral thesis is to investigate a fundamental topic of research within the Multiagent Systems paradigm: the problem of defining open, heterogeneous, and dynamic interaction frameworks. That is to realize interaction systems where multiple agents can enter and leave dynamically and where no assumptions are made on the internal structure of the interacting agents. Such topic of research has received much attention in the past few years. In particular the need to realize applications where artificial agents can interact negotiate, exchange information, resources, and services has become more and more important thanks to the advent of Internet. I started my studies by developing a trading agent that took part to an international trading on-line game: the First Trading Agent Competition (TAC). During the design and development phase of the trading agent some crucial and critical troubles emerged: the problem of accurately understanding the rules that govern the different auctions; and the problem of understanding the meaning of the numerous messages. Another general problem is that the internal structure of the developed trading agent have been strongly determined by the peculiar interface of the interaction system, consequently without any changes in its code, it would not be able to take part to any other competition on the Web. Furthermore the trading agent would not have been able to exploit opportunities, to handle unexpected situations, or to reason about the rules of the various auctions, since it is not able to understand the meaning o the exchanged messages. The presence of all those problems bears out the need to find a standard common accepted way to define open interaction systems. The most important component of every interaction framework, as is remarked also by philosophical studies on human communication is the institution of language. Therefore I start to investigate the problem of defining a standard and common accepted semantics for Agent Communication Languages (ACL). The solutions proposed so far are at best partial, and are considered as unsatisfactory by a large number of specialists. In particular, they are unable to support verifiable compliance to standards and to make agents responsible for their communicative actions. Furthermore such proposals make the strong assumption that every interacting agent may be modeled as a Belief-Desire-Intention agent. What is required is an approach focused on externally observable events as opposed to the unobservable internal states of agents. Following Speech Act Theory that views language use as a form of action, I propose an operational specification for the definition of a standard ACL based on the notion of social commitment. In such a proposal the meaning of basic communicative acts is defined as the effect that it has on the social relationship between the sender and the receiver described through operation on an unambiguous, objective, and public "object": the commitment. The adoption of the notion of commitment is crucial to stabilize the interaction among agents, to create an expectation on other agents behavior, to enable agents to reason about their and other agents actions. The proposed ACL is verifiable, that is, it is possible to determine if an agent is behaving in accordance to its communicative actions; the semantics is objective, independent of the agent's internal structure, flexible and extensible, simple, yet enough expressive. A complete operational specification of an interaction framework using the proposed commitment-based ACL is presented. In particular some sample applications of how to use the proposed framework to formalize interaction protocols are reported. A list of soundness conditions to test if a protocol is sound is proposed