Imperfect best-response mechanisms

Abstract

Best-response mechanisms (Nisan, Schapira, Valiant, Zohar, 2011) provide a unifying framework for studying various distributed protocols in which the participants are instructed to repeatedly best respond to each others' strategies. Two fundamental features of these mechanisms are convergence and incentive compatibility. This work investigates convergence and incentive compatibility conditions of such mechanisms when players are not guaranteed to always best respond but they rather play an imperfect best-response strategy. That is, at every time step every player deviates from the prescribed best-response strategy according to some probability parameter. The results explain to what extent convergence and incentive compatibility depend on the assumption that players never make mistakes, and how robust such protocols are to "noise" or "mistakes".