Abstract
This work initiates the study of cost-sharing mechanisms that, in addition to the usual incentive compatibility conditions, make it disadvantageous for the users to employ pseudonyms. We show that this is possible only if all serviced users pay the same price, which implies that such mechanisms do not exist even for certain subadditive cost functions. In practice, a user can increase her utility by lying in one way (misreport her willingness to pay) or another (misreport her identity). We prove also results for approximately budget-balanced mechanisms. Finally, we consider mechanisms that rely on some kind of “reputation” associated to the pseudonyms and show that they are provably better.
Work supported by the European Project IST-15964 “Algorithmic Principles for Building Efficient Overlay Computers” (AEOLUS), by the European Project COST 295 (DYNAMO), and by a fellowship within the Postdoc-Programme of the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD). Part of this work has been done while the first author was visiting ETH Zürich. Research done while the second author was at the University of Paderborn, Germany.
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Penna, P., Schoppmann, F., Silvestri, R., Widmayer, P. (2009). Pseudonyms in Cost-Sharing Games. In: Leonardi, S. (eds) Internet and Network Economics. WINE 2009. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 5929. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-10841-9_24
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-10841-9_24
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