Incomplete Punishment Networks in Public Goods Games: Experimental Evidence

Abundant evidence suggests that high levels of contributions to public goods can be sustained through self-governed monitoring and sanctioning. This experimental study investigates the effectiveness of decentralized sanctioning institutions in alternative punishment networks. Our results show that the structure of punishment network significantly affects allocations to the public good. In addition, we observe that network configurations are more important than punishment capacities for the levels of public good provision, imposed sanctions and economic efficiency. Lastly, we show that targeted revenge is a major driver of anti-social punishment

Compressed Secret Key Agreement: Maximizing Multivariate Mutual Information Per Bit

The multiterminal secret key agreement problem by public discussion is formulated with an additional source compression step where, prior to the public discussion phase, users independently compress their private sources to filter out strongly correlated components for generating a common secret key. The objective is to maximize the achievable key rate as a function of the joint entropy of the compressed sources. Since the maximum achievable key rate captures the total amount of information mutual to the compressed sources, an optimal compression scheme essentially maximizes the multivariate mutual information per bit of randomness of the private sources, and can therefore be viewed more generally as a dimension reduction technique. Single-letter lower and upper bounds on the maximum achievable key rate are derived for the general source model, and an explicit polynomial-time computable formula is obtained for the pairwise independent network model. In particular, the converse results and the upper bounds are obtained from those of the related secret key agreement problem with rate-limited discussion. A precise duality is shown for the two-user case with one-way discussion, and such duality is extended to obtain the desired converse results in the multi-user case. In addition to posing new challenges in information processing and dimension reduction, the compressed secret key agreement problem helps shed new light on resolving the difficult problem of secret key agreement with rate-limited discussion, by offering a more structured achieving scheme and some simpler conjectures to prove

Group Secret Key Generation in Wireless Networks : Algorithms and Rate Optimization

This paper investigates group secret key generation problems for different types of wireless networks, by exploiting physical layer characteristics of wireless channels. A new group key generation strategy with low complexity is proposed, which combines the well-established point-to-point pairwise key generation technique, the multisegment scheme, and the one-time pad. In particular, this group key generation process is studied for three types of communication networks: 1) the three-node network; 2) the multinode ring network; and 3) the multinode mesh network. Three group key generation algorithms are developed for these communication networks, respectively. The analysis shows that the first two algorithms yield optimal group key rates, whereas the third algorithm achieves the optimal multiplexing gain. Next, for the first two types of networks, we address the time allocation problem in the channel estimation step to maximize the group key rates. This non-convex max-min time allocation problem is first reformulated into a series of geometric programming, and then, a single-condensation-method-based iterative algorithm is proposed. Numerical results are also provided to validate the performance of the proposed key generation algorithms and the time allocation algorithm