论文标题
贝叶斯说服符合机制设计:超出了棘手的性能与类型的报告
Bayesian Persuasion Meets Mechanism Design: Going Beyond Intractability with Type Reporting
论文作者
论文摘要
贝叶斯说服研究知情的发件人应如何部分披露信息,以影响自我利益接收者的行为。在过去的几年中,越来越多的关注致力于放松以下假设:发件人完美地知道接收者的回报。朝着这样的成就迈出的第一步是研究设置每个接收器的收益取决于其未知类型,该类型由已知的有限支持的概率分布随机确定。这会引起巨大的计算挑战,因为计算发件人最佳的信号传导方案在任何恒定因素内都可以不合时宜。在这项工作中,我们通过利用机制设计的思想来避免这个问题。特别是,我们介绍了一个类型的报告步骤,要求接收者向发件人报告其类型,因为后者已承诺为每个可能的接收器类型定义信号方案的菜单。我们证明,使用单个接收器,此类报告阶段的添加使发件人的计算问题可处理。然后,我们将框架扩展到具有多个接收器的设置,重点是没有代理外部性和二进制操作的情况。我们表明,可以通过椭圆形方法在多项式时间中找到发件人最佳解决方案,从而访问合适的多项式分离甲骨文。这可以用于超模型和匿名发件人的实用程序功能。至于子解多发件人的实用程序函数,我们首先将发件人的问题大约将发件人的问题置于线性约束的数学程序中,其目标函数是发件人效用的多线性扩展。然后,我们通过连续的贪婪算法来展示如何在多项式时间中找到该程序的近似解决方案。这为问题提供了(1 -1/e) - 及时。
Bayesian persuasion studies how an informed sender should partially disclose information so as to influence the behavior of self-interested receivers. In the last years, a growing attention has been devoted to relaxing the assumption that the sender perfectly knows receiver's payoffs. The first crucial step towards such an achievement is to study settings where each receiver's payoffs depend on their unknown type, which is randomly determined by a known finite-supported probability distribution. This begets considerable computational challenges, as computing a sender-optimal signaling scheme is inapproximable up to within any constant factor. In this work, we circumvent this issue by leveraging ideas from mechanism design. In particular, we introduce a type reporting step in which the receiver is asked to report their type to the sender, after the latter has committed to a menu defining a signaling scheme for each possible receiver's type. We prove that, with a single receiver, the addition of this type reporting stage makes the sender's computational problem tractable. Then, we extend our framework to settings with multiple receivers, focusing on the case of no inter-agent externalities and binary actions. We show that it is possible to find a sender-optimal solution in polynomial-time by means of the ellipsoid method, given access to a suitable polynomial-time separation oracle. This can be implemented for supermodular and anonymous sender's utility functions. As for the case of submodular sender's utility functions, we first approximately cast the sender's problem into a linearly-constrained mathematical program whose objective function is the multi-linear extension of the sender's utility. Then, we show how to find in polynomial-time an approximate solution to the program by means of a continuous greedy algorithm. This provides a (1 -1/e)-approximation to the problem.