Network Intervention by Polling Strategic Agents

Agent Multi-agent Collaboration ML Other ML
一位规划者在由策略性代理人构成的网络中面临三大相互交织的挑战:其一,最优解依赖于各代理人的私有信息;其二,被问询的代理人可能故意提供虚假报告,以操纵最终结果;其三,精确计算无法随网络规模扩大而有效扩展。我们针对多活动网络博弈(其中各代理人拥有异质性的私有技术)研究了上述挑战,并假设规划者设定的是非歧视性价格。我们证明,最优价格可通过对福利核(welfare kernel)进行基于中心性的分解来刻画:每位代理人的贡献与其在经代理人跨活动偏好重新加权后的网络中的中心性平方成正比。这一分解催生了“投票法”(Poll)——一种轮询式算法:规划者每轮随机抽样一名代理人,短暂遍历该代理人的邻域,并依据其提供的局部信息更新价格。同样源于该分解,Poll 算法展现出三重效率: 计算层面,Poll 所需运算量显著少于精确计算及其他分布式方法;在包含逾30万代理人的真实世界网络上,其通信开销最多可降低三个数量级; 统计层面,其查询复杂度取决于网络拓扑结构与偏好异质性,而非直接随总体规模增长; 经济层面,该算法收敛至使社会福利最大化的最优价格,且可通过针对不同行为模式定制的具体实施机制,激励代理人如实报告,并识别出对抗性偏离行为。
A planner in a network of strategic agents faces three entangled challenges: the optimum depends on agents' private information, queried agents may misreport to steer the outcome, and exact computation does not scale. We study these challenges in multi-activity network games with heterogeneous private technologies, in which the planner sets non-discriminatory prices. We show that the optimal prices admit a centrality-based decomposition of the welfare kernel: each agent's contribution scales with its squared centrality in a network reweighted by agents' preferences across activities. This decomposition motivates Poll, a polling algorithm in which the planner samples one agent per round, walks briefly through the agent's neighborhood, and updates the price from a local report. From the same decomposition flow three forms of efficiency: computationally, Poll uses significantly fewer operations than exact computation and other distributed methods, requiring up to three orders of magnitude less communication on a real-world network with over 300,000 agents; statistically, its query complexity scales with topology and preference heterogeneity rather than explicitly with population size; and economically, it converges to welfare-maximizing prices while admitting behavior-specific implementations that induce truthful reports and detect adversarial deviations.
许愿