Information Sharing in Networks of Strategic Agents

To ensure that social networks (e.g. opinion consensus, cooperative estimation, distributed learning and adaptation etc.) proliferate and efficiently operate, the participating agents need to collaborate with each other by repeatedly sharing information. However, sharing information is often costly for the agents while resulting in no direct immediate benefit for them. Hence, lacking incentives to collaborate, strategic agents who aim to maximize their own individual utilities will withhold rather than share information, leading to inefficient operation or even collapse of networks. In this paper, we develop a systematic framework for designing distributed rating protocols aimed at incentivizing the strategic agents to collaborate with each other by sharing information. The proposed incentive protocols exploit the ongoing nature of the agents’ interactions to assign ratings and through them, determine future rewards and punishments: agents that have behaved as directed enjoy high ratings – and hence greater future access to the information of others; agents that have not behaved as directed enjoy low ratings – and hence less future access to the information of others. Unlike existing rating protocols, the proposed protocol operates in a distributed manner, online, and takes into consideration the underlying interconnectivity of agents as well as their heterogeneity. We prove that in many deployment scenarios the price of anarchy (PoA) obtained by adopting the proposed rating protocols is one. In settings in which the PoA is larger than one, we show that the proposed rating protocol still significantly outperforms existing incentive mechanisms such as Tit-for-Tat. Importantly, the proposed rating protocols can also operate efficiently in deployment scenarios where the strategic agents interact over time-varying network topologies where new agents join the network over time.