Passive Verification of the Strategyproofness of Mechanisms in Open Environments

Abstract

Consider an open infrastructure in which anyone can deploy mechanisms to support automated decision making and coordination amongst self-interested computational agents. Strategyproofness is a central property in the design of such mechanisms, allowing participants to maximize their individual benefit by reporting truthful private information about preferences and capabilities and without modeling or reasoning about the behavior of other agents. But, why should participants trust that a mechanism is strategyproof? We address this problem, proposing and describing a passive verifier, able to monitor the inputs and outputs of mechanisms and verify the strategyproofness, or not, of a mechanism. Useful guarantees are available to participants before the behavior of the mechanism is completely known, and metrics are introduced to provide a measure of partial verification. Experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of our method.