Mechanism design
Distributed Algorithmic Mechanism Design: Recent Results and Future Directions. Joan Feigenbaum and Scott Shenker
Mechanism design asks how one can design systems so that agents’ selfish behavior results in the desired system-wide goals (similar to incentive design)
The mechanism designer’s task is to find a formula for the payments that causes agents to be no worse off by revealing their true costs than they would be by lying about their costs
Mechanisms in which agents are asked to directly reveal their utility functions are call direct mechanisms
A dominant strategy is one where agents only choose strategies that regardless of how other agents play, never result in lower payoffs than any other strategy.