Computational-Mechanism Design: A Call to Arms

Game theory has developed several powerful tools for analyzing decision making in systems composed of multiple autonomous actors. Given this fact, AI practitioners would like to exploit these tools when building software systems containing multiple agents. However, to do this, the tools must be tailored to computational settings. To this end, the authors provide an overview of computational-mechanism design, which deals with the application of economic principles in computer systems design. Moreover, because many complex systems are inherently distributed, they also present initial results from the relatively new field of distributed-computational-mechanism design and outline the key challenges involved in making the ideas practicable.