Abstract
This work initiates the study of cost-sharing mechanisms that, in addition to the usual incentive compatibility conditions, make it disadvantageous for the users to employ pseudonyms. We show that this is possible only if all serviced users pay the same price, which implies that such mechanisms do not exist even for certain subadditive cost functions. In practice, a user can increase her utility by lying in one way (misreport her willingness to pay) or another (misreport her identity). We prove also results for approximately budget-balanced mechanisms. Finally, we consider mechanisms that rely on some kind of “reputation” associated to the pseudonyms and show that they are provably better.
Work supported by the European Project IST-15964 “Algorithmic Principles for Building Efficient Overlay Computers” (AEOLUS), by the European Project COST 295 (DYNAMO), and by a fellowship within the Postdoc-Programme of the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD). Part of this work has been done while the first author was visiting ETH Zürich. Research done while the second author was at the University of Paderborn, Germany.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
References
Aggarwal, G., Fiat, A., Goldberg, A.V., Hartline, J.D., Immorlica, N., Sudan, M.: Derandomization of auctions. In: Proc. of 37th STOC (2005)
Bleischwitz, Y., Monien, B.: Fair cost-sharing methods for scheduling jobs on parallel machines. In: Calamoneri, T., Finocchi, I., Italiano, G.F. (eds.) CIAC 2006. LNCS, vol. 3998, pp. 175–186. Springer, Heidelberg (2006)
Bleischwitz, Y., Monien, B., Schoppmann, F.: To be or not to be (served). In: Deng, X., Graham, F.C. (eds.) WINE 2007. LNCS, vol. 4858, pp. 515–528. Springer, Heidelberg (2007)
Bleischwitz, Y., Monien, B., Schoppmann, F., Tiemann, K.: The power of two prices: Beyond cross-monotonicity. In: Kučera, L., Kučera, A. (eds.) MFCS 2007. LNCS, vol. 4708, pp. 657–668. Springer, Heidelberg (2007)
Cheng, A., Friedman, E.: Sybilproof reputation mechanisms. In: Proc. of the 3rd Workshop on Economics of Peer-to-Peer Systems (P2PECON), pp. 128–132 (2005)
Cohen, B.: Incentives Build Robustness in BitTorrent. In: Proc. of the 1st Workshop on Economics of Peer-to-Peer Systems, P2PECON (2003)
Conitzer, V.: Limited verification of identities to induce false-name-proofness. In: Proc. of the 11th TARK, pp. 102–111 (2007)
Dobzinski, S., Mehta, A., Roughgarden, T., Sundararajan, M.: Is Shapley Cost Sharing Optimal? In: Monien, B., Schroeder, U.-P. (eds.) SAGT 2008. LNCS, vol. 4997, pp. 327–336. Springer, Heidelberg (2008)
Douceur, J.R.: The sybil attack. In: Druschel, P., Kaashoek, M.F., Rowstron, A. (eds.) IPTPS 2002. LNCS, vol. 2429, pp. 251–260. Springer, Heidelberg (2002)
Feldman, M., Papadimitriou, C., Chuang, J., Stoica, I.: Free-riding and whitewashing in peer-to-peer systems. In: Proc. of ACM SIGCOMM workshop PINS, pp. 228–236 (2004)
Friedman, E., Resnick, P.: The social cost of cheap pseudonyms. Journal of Economics and Management Strategy 10(2), 173–199 (2001)
Goldberg, A., Hartline, J.: Collusion-resistant mechanisms for single-parameter agents. In: Proc. of the 16th SODA, pp. 620–629 (2005)
Gottlieb, D.H.: A certain class of incidence matrices. In: Proc. Amer. Math. Soc., pp. 1233–1237 (1966)
Immorlica, N., Mahdian, M., Mirrokni, V.S.: Limitations of cross-monotonic cost sharing schemes. In: Proc. of the 16th SODA, pp. 602–611 (2005)
Izal, M., Urvoy-Keller, G., Biersack, E., Felber, P., Hamra, A., Garces-Erice, L.: Dissecting BitTorrent: Five Months in a Torrent’s Lifetime. In: Barakat, C., Pratt, I. (eds.) PAM 2004. LNCS, vol. 3015, pp. 1–11. Springer, Heidelberg (2004)
Jain, K., Vazirani, V.V.: Applications of approximation algorithms to cooperative games. In: Proc. of the 33rd STOC, pp. 364–372 (2001)
Juarez, R.: Collusion-proof cost sharing. Technical report, Mimeo University of Hawaii (2007)
Juarez, R.: Group strategyproof cost sharing: the role of indifferences. Technical report, Mimeo University of Hawaii (2008)
Jukna, S.: Extremal Combinatorics With Applications in Computer Science. Springer, Heidelberg (2001)
Könemann, J., Leonardi, S., Schäfer, G., van Zwam, S.H.M.: A group-strategyproof cost sharing mechanism for the steiner forest game. SIAM J. Comput. 37(5), 1319–1341 (2008)
Locher, T., Moor, P., Schmid, S., Wattenhofer, R.: Free Riding in BitTorrent is Cheap. In: Proc. of the 5th HotNets (2006)
Mehta, A., Roughgarden, T., Sundararajan, M.: Beyond Moulin Mechanisms. In: Proc. of ACM EC, pp. 1–10 (2007)
Moulin, H.: Incremental cost sharing: characterization by coalition strategy-proofness. Social Choice and Welfare 16(2), 279–320 (1999)
Moulin, H., Shenker, S.: Strategyproof sharing of submodular costs: budget balance versus efficiency. Economic Theory 18(3), 511–533 (2001)
Newsome, J., Shi, E., Song, D., Perrig, A.: The sybil attack in sensor networks: analysis & defenses. In: Proc. of the 3rd IPSN, pp. 259–268 (2004)
Penna, P., Schoppmann, F., Silvestri, R., Widmayer, P.: Pseudonyms in cost-sharing games. Technical report, AEOLUS (2009), http://aeolus.ceid.upatras.gr/
Penna, P., Ventre, C.: More powerful and simpler cost-sharing methods. In: Persiano, G., Solis-Oba, R. (eds.) WAOA 2004. LNCS, vol. 3351, pp. 97–110. Springer, Heidelberg (2005)
Penna, P., Ventre, C.: The algorithmic structure of group strategyproof budget-balanced cost-sharing mechanisms. In: Durand, B., Thomas, W. (eds.) STACS 2006. LNCS, vol. 3884, pp. 337–348. Springer, Heidelberg (2006)
Roughgarden, T., Sundararajan, M.: New trade-offs in cost-sharing mechanisms. In: Proc. of the 38th STOC, pp. 79–88 (2006)
Wagman, L., Conitzer, V.: Optimal false-name-proof voting rules with costly voting. In: Proc. of 23rd AAAI, pp. 190–195 (2008)
Yokoo, M.: Characterization of Strategy/False-name Proof Combinatorial Auction Protocols: Price-oriented, Rationing-free Protocol. In: Proc. of the 18th IJCAI, pp. 733–742 (2003)
Yokoo, M., Sakurai, Y., Matsubara, S.: The Effect of False-name Bids in Combinatorial Auctions: New Fraud in Internet Auctions. Games and Economic Behavior 46(1), 174–188 (2004)
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2009 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg
About this paper
Cite this paper
Penna, P., Schoppmann, F., Silvestri, R., Widmayer, P. (2009). Pseudonyms in Cost-Sharing Games. In: Leonardi, S. (eds) Internet and Network Economics. WINE 2009. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 5929. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-10841-9_24
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-10841-9_24
Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg
Print ISBN: 978-3-642-10840-2
Online ISBN: 978-3-642-10841-9
eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)