Sybil-Proof Mechanism for Information Propagation with Budgets

Abstract: This paper examines the problem of distributing rewards on social networks to improve the efficiency of crowdsourcing tasks for sponsors. To complete the tasks efficiently, we aim to design reward mechanisms that incentivize early-joining agents to invite more participants to the tasks. Nonetheless, participants could potentially engage in strategic behaviors, e.g., not inviting others to the tasks, misreporting their capacity for the tasks, or creaking fake identities (aka Sybil attacks), to maximize their own rewards. The focus of this study is to address the challenge outlined above by designing effective reward mechanisms. To this end, we propose a novel reward mechanism, called Propagation Reward Distribution Mechanism (PRDM), for the general information propagation model with limited budgets. It is proved that the PRDM can not only incentivize all agents to contribute their full efforts to the tasks and share the task information to all their neighbors in the social networks, but can also prevent them from Sybil attacks.