Handling Self-Interest in Multi-Agent Decision Problems ∗

TL;DRAbstract

One sunny May afternoon three friends decide to attend a baseball game, as all are big fans of the local pro team. To their dismay, when they arrive at the ballpark they find a line so long it snakes around the block. After 45 minutes waiting the friends finally reach the ticket counter, only to have the vendor inform them there’s just a single ticket left! Each of the three wants badly to see the game, even if it would have to be alone; in fact they each want to go so bad that they can’t even think about the interests of the other two in the group. The friends agree that the person who most wants to see the game should get to go, but each one’s value for seeing the game is unknown to the other two. The friends must now somehow decide who gets the ticket. This story is just one of a practically boundless number one can imagine in which a group of self-interested agents must jointly make a decision. In this particular example a scarce resource is to be allocated to a single person. More

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