Rationality authority for provable rational behavior

Shlomi Dolev, Panagiota N. Panagopoulou, Mikaël Rabie, Elad M. Schiller, Paul G. Spirakis

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingConference contributionpeer-review

3 Scopus citations

Abstract

Players in a game are assumed to be totally rational and absolutely smart. However, in reality all players may act in non-rational ways and may fail to understand and find their best actions. In particular, participants in social interactions, such as lotteries and auctions, cannot be expected to always find by themselves the "best-reply" to any situation. Indeed, agents may consult with others about the possible outcome of their actions. It is then up to the counselee to assure the rationality of the consultant's advice. We present a distributed computer system infrastructure, named rationality authority, that allows safe consultation among (possibly biased) parties. The parties' advices are adapted only after verifying their feasibility and optimality by standard formal proof checkers. The rationality authority design considers computational constraints, as well as privacy and security issues, such as verification methods that do not reveal private preferences. Some of the techniques resembles zero-knowledge proofs. A non-cooperative game is presented by the game inventor along with its (possibly intractable) equilibrium. The game inventor advises playing by this equilibrium and offers a checkable proof for the equilibrium feasibility and optimality. Standard verification procedures, provided by trusted (according to their reputation) verification procedures, are used to verify the proof. Thus, the proposed rationality authority infrastructure facilitates the applications of game theory in several important real-life scenarios by the use of computing systems.

Original languageEnglish
Title of host publicationPODC'11 - Proceedings of the 2011 ACM Symposium Principles of Distributed Computing
Pages289-290
Number of pages2
DOIs
StatePublished - 7 Jul 2011
Event30th Annual ACM SIGACT-SIGOPS Symposium on Principles of Distributed Computing, PODC'11, Held as Part of the 5th Federated Computing Research Conference, FCRC - San Jose, CA, United States
Duration: 6 Jun 20118 Jun 2011

Publication series

NameProceedings of the Annual ACM Symposium on Principles of Distributed Computing

Conference

Conference30th Annual ACM SIGACT-SIGOPS Symposium on Principles of Distributed Computing, PODC'11, Held as Part of the 5th Federated Computing Research Conference, FCRC
Country/TerritoryUnited States
CitySan Jose, CA
Period6/06/118/06/11

Keywords

  • game authority
  • game theory
  • privacy
  • rationality authority

ASJC Scopus subject areas

  • Software
  • Hardware and Architecture
  • Computer Networks and Communications

Fingerprint

Dive into the research topics of 'Rationality authority for provable rational behavior'. Together they form a unique fingerprint.

Cite this