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Computer-Aided Verification for Mechanism Design

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Web and Internet Economics (WINE 2016)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNTCS,volume 10123))

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Abstract

We explore techniques from computer-aided verification to construct formal proofs of incentive properties. Because formal proofs can be automatically checked, agents do not need to manually check the properties, or even understand the proof. To demonstrate, we present the verification of a sophisticated mechanism: the generic reduction from Bayesian incentive compatible mechanism design to algorithm design given by Hartline, Kleinberg, and Malekian. This mechanism presents new challenges for formal verification, including essential use of randomness from both the execution of the mechanism and from the prior type distributions.

The full version of this paper is available at https://arxiv.org/abs/1502.04052.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Our formal proofs, along with code for the \(\textsf {HOARe}^2\) tool, are available online: https://github.com/ejgallego/HOARe2/tree/master/examples/bic.

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Acknowledgments

We thank the anonymous reviewers for their careful reading; their suggestions have significantly improved this work. This work was partially supported by NSF grants TWC-1513694, CNS-1237235, CNS-1565365 and a grant from the Simons Foundation (\(\#360368\) to Justin Hsu).

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. IMDEA Software Institute, Madrid, Spain

    Gilles Barthe & Pierre-Yves Strub

  2. University at Buffalo, SUNY, Buffalo, USA

    Marco Gaboardi

  3. MINES ParisTech, Paris, France

    Emilio Jesús Gallego Arias

  4. University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, USA

    Justin Hsu & Aaron Roth

Authors
  1. Gilles Barthe
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  2. Marco Gaboardi
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  3. Emilio Jesús Gallego Arias
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  4. Justin Hsu
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  5. Aaron Roth
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  6. Pierre-Yves Strub
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Justin Hsu .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. School of Computer Science, McGill University, Montreal, Québec, Canada

    Yang Cai

  2. Department of Mathematics and Statistics, and School of Computer Science, McGill University, Montreal, Québec, Canada

    Adrian Vetta

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Barthe, G., Gaboardi, M., Arias, E.J.G., Hsu, J., Roth, A., Strub, PY. (2016). Computer-Aided Verification for Mechanism Design. In: Cai, Y., Vetta, A. (eds) Web and Internet Economics. WINE 2016. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 10123. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-662-54110-4_20

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-662-54110-4_20

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  • Print ISBN: 978-3-662-54109-8

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