In this paper, we study distributed consensus in synchronous systems subject to both unexpected crash failures and strategic manipulations by rational agents in the system. We adapt the concept of collusion-resistant Nash equilibrium to model protocols that are resilient to both crash failures and strategic manipulations of a group of colluding agents. For a system with n distributed agents, we...

We investigate how like-minded agents can reach consensus on their decisions even if they receive different information. The model used here was introduced by Aumann, and subsequently refined by Geanakoplos and Polemarchakis, Bacharach, Cave, Parikh and Krasucki ([Aum76,GP82,Cav83,Bac85,PK]). The main result is that when any number of like-minded agents communicate according to some fair protoc...

N THE THREE DECADES since the publication of the seminal work on rational expectations, a steely consensus has been forged in the economics profession regarding acceptable modeling procedures.’ Simply stated, the consensus is that economic actors do not persist in making foolish mistakes in forecasting over time. People are presumed to be able to both detect past patterns in their prediction er...