A System for Distributed Mechanisms: Design, Implementation and Applications

We describe here a structured system for distributed mechanism design. In our approach the players dynamically form a network in which they know neither their neighbours nor the size of the network and interact to jointly take decisions. The only assumption concerning the underlying communication layer is that for each pair of processes there is a path of neighbours connecting them.This allows us to deal with arbitrary network topologies. We also discuss the implementation of this system that consists of a sequence of layers. The lower layers deal with the operations relevant for distributed computing only, while the upper layers are concerned only with communication among players, including broadcasting and multicasting, and distributed decision making. This yields a highly flexible distributed system whose specific applications are realized as instances of a top layer. This design is implemented in Java. The system can be used for a repeated creation of dynamically formed networks of players interested in a joint decision making implemented by means of a tax-based mechanism. We illustrate its flexibility by discussing a number of implemented examples.