Incentive Compatible Mechanism for Influential Agent Selection

Abstract: Selecting the most influential agent in a network has huge practical value in applications. However, in many scenarios, the graph structure can only be known from agents' reports on their connections. In a self-interested setting, agents may strategically hide some connections to make themselves seem to be more important. In this paper, we study the incentive compatible (IC) selection mechanism to prevent such manipulations. Specifically, we model the progeny of an agent as her influence power, i.e., the number of nodes in the subgraph rooted at her. We then propose the Geometric Mechanism, which selects an agent with at least 1/2 of the optimal progeny in expectation under the properties of incentive compatibility and fairness. Fairness requires that two roots with the same contribution in two graphs are assigned the same probability. Furthermore, we prove an upper bound of 1/(1+\ln 2) for any incentive compatible and fair selection mechanisms.