Creating Incentives to Prevent Intentional Execution Failures

When information or control in a multiagent system is private to the agents, they may misreport this information or refuse to execute an agreed outcome, in order to change the resulting end state of such a system to their benefit. This may result in execution failures. When only information is private, mechanisms such as VCG use payments to create incentives for truthful behavior, and can then guarantee a non-negative utility for all agents. However, when control is also private, such existing mechanisms lose truthfulness and individual rationality: payments should depend on the actual outcome (not on the planned outcome) and some agents should be compensated. We give a more general version of the known negative result in the context of actions with dependencies, and we give a mechanism that can guarantee a nonnegative utility to the agents and is truthful in an ex-post Nash equilibrium.