{"type":"ScholarlyArticle","title":"Mechanisms That Play a Game, Not Toss a Coin","authors":[{"name":"Toby Walsh","slug":"toby-walsh","given":"Toby","family":"Walsh","affiliation":"AI Institute , UNSW Sydney"}],"abstract":"Randomized mechanisms can have good normative properties compared to their deterministic counter-parts. However, randomized mechanisms are problematic in several ways such as in their verifiability. We propose here to de-randomize such mechanisms by having agents play a game instead of tossing a coin. The game is designed so agents play randomly, and this play injects “randomness” into the mechanism. Surprisingly this de-randomization retains many of the good normative properties of the original randomized mechanism but gives a mechanism that is deterministic and easy, for instance, to audit. We consider three general purpose methods to de-randomize mechanisms, and apply these to six different domains: voting, facility location, task allocation, school choice, peer selection, and resource allocation. We propose a number of novel de-randomized mechanisms for these six domains with good normative properties (such as equilibria in which agents sincerely report preferences over the original problem). In one domain, we additionally show that a new and desirable normative property emerges as a result of de-randomization.property emerges as a result of de-randomization.","doi":"10.24963/ijcai.2024/333","url":"https://ijcai.org/proceedings/2024/333","pdf":"https://ijcai.org/proceedings/2024/0333.pdf","markdown":"https://ijcai.org/proceedings/2024/333.md","bibtex":"https://ijcai.org/proceedings/2024/bibtex/333","volume":{"slug":"2024","title":"Proceedings of the Thirty-Third International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence","short_title":"IJCAI 2024","url":"https://ijcai.org/proceedings/2024/","year":2024,"location":"Jeju, Korea","dates":"3-9 August 2024","editors":"Kate Larson","isbn":"978-1-956792-04-1","publisher":"International Joint Conferences on Artificial Intelligence Organization","doi_prefix":"10.24963/ijcai.2024"},"section":"Game Theory and Economic Paradigms","track":"Main Track","number":333,"pages":{"first":3005,"last":3013},"keywords":["Game Theory and Economic Paradigms: GTEP: Fair division","Game Theory and Economic Paradigms: GTEP: Mechanism design","Agent-based and Multi-agent Systems: MAS: Resource allocation","Game Theory and Economic Paradigms: GTEP: Computational social choice"],"videos":[],"references":[{"position":1,"raw":"[Abdulkadiroglu and Sonmez, 1998] A. 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