A contract-based incentive mechanism for distributed meeting scheduling: Can agents who value privacy tell the truth?

摘要

We consider a distributed meeting scheduling problem where agents negotiate with each other to reach a consensus over the starting time of the meeting. Each agent has a private preference over a set of time slots, and aims to select its own preferred slot while revealing as little information about its preference as possible. A key challenge in this canonical setting is whether it is possible to design a distributed mechanism where agents that value their privacy are motivated to tell the truth about their preferences. In this paper, we give a positive answer by proposing a novel incentive mechanism based on economic contract theory. A set of contracts are carefully designed for agents of different types, consisting of the required actions, corresponding rewards and the privacy leakage level. By selecting the contract that maximises its own utility, each agent will not deviate from the required actions and can avoid unnecessary privacy leakage. Other properties of the mechanism such as budget balance, no need for a central authority, and near-optimal social welfare are also theoretically proved. Our empirical evaluations show that our proposed mechanism reduces privacy leakage by 58% compared to a standard calendar-sharing scheme. The social welfare of the proposed mechanism reaches over 88% of the optimal centralized method, and is higher than the social welfare of the state-of-the-art schemes by between 16 and 82%. A better trade-off between the privacy leakage and the number of rounds for convergence is also achieved compared to a typical negotiation mechanism.