Distributed Mechanism Design for Multicast Transmission

Abstract: In the standard Mechanism Design framework (Hurwicz-Reiter), there is a central authority that gathers agents' messages and subsequently determines the allocation and tax for each agent. We consider a scenario where, due to communication overhead and other constraints, such broadcasting of messages to a central authority cannot take place. Instead, only local message exchange is allowed between agents. As a result, each agent should be able to determine her own allocation and tax based on the messages in the local neighborhood, as defined by a given message graph describing the communication constraints. This scenario gives rise to a novel research direction that we call "Distributed Mechanism Design". In this paper, we propose such a distributed mechanism for the problem of rate allocation in a multicast transmission network. The proposed mechanism fully implements the optimal allocation in Nash equilibria and its message space dimension is linear with respect to the number of agents in the network.