@InProceedings{smorodinsky04a,
  author =	 {Rann Smorodinsky and Moshe Tennenholtz},
  title =	 {Sequential Information Elicitation in Multi-Agent
                  Systems},
  booktitle =	 {Proceedings of the 20th Conference on Uncertainty in
                  Artificial intelligence},
  pages =	 {528--535},
  year =	 2004,
  abstract =	 {We introduce the study of sequential information
                  elicitation in strategic multi-agent systems. In an
                  information elicitation setup a center attempts to
                  compute the value of a function based on private
                  information (a-ka secrets) accessible to a set of
                  agents. We consider the classical multi-party
                  computation setup where each agent is interested in
                  knowing the result of the function. However, in our
                  setting each agent is strategic, and since acquiring
                  information is costly, an agent may be tempted not
                  spending the efforts of obtaining the information,
                  free-riding on other agents' computations. A
                  mechanism which elicits agents' secrets and performs
                  the desired computation defines a game. A mechanism
                  is `appropriate' if there exists an equilibrium in
                  which it is able to elicit (sufficiently many)
                  agents' secrets and perform the computation, for all
                  possible secret vectors. We characterize a general
                  efficient procedure for determining an appropriate
                  mechanism, if such mechanism exists. Moreover, we
                  also address the existence problem, providing a
                  polynomial algorithm for verifying the existence of
                  an appropriate mechanism.},
  url = 	 {http://jmvidal.cse.sc.edu/library/smorodinsky04a.pdf},
  cluster = 	 {12348203169770486078}
}