Hidden-action in multi-hop routing. Feldman, M., Chuang, J., Stoica, I., & Shenker, S 06/2005 2005.
Hidden-action in multi-hop routing [link]Paper  doi  abstract   bibtex   
In multi-hop networks, the actions taken by individual intermediate nodes are typically hidden from the communicating endpoints; all the endpoints can observe is whether or not the end-to-end transmission was successful. Therefore, in the absence of incentives to the contrary, rational (i.e., selfish) intermediate nodes may choose to forward packets at a low priority or simply not forward packets at all. Using a principal-agent model, we show how the hidden-action problem can be overcome through appropriate design of contracts, in both the direct (the endpoints contract with each individual router) and recursive (each router contracts with the next downstream router) cases. We further demonstrate that per-hop monitoring does not necessarily improve the utility of the principal or the social welfare in the system. In addition, we generalize existing mechanisms that deal with hidden-information to handle scenarios involving both hidden-information and hidden-action.
@conference {Feldman:2005:HMR:1064009.1064022,
	title = {Hidden-action in multi-hop routing},
	booktitle = {EC{\textquoteright}05. Proceedings of the 6th ACM Conference on Electronic Commerce},
	series = {EC {\textquoteright}05},
	year = {2005},
	month = {06/2005},
	pages = {117{\textendash}126},
	publisher = {ACM},
	organization = {ACM},
	address = {Vancouver, Canada},
	abstract = {In multi-hop networks, the actions taken by individual intermediate nodes are typically hidden from the communicating endpoints; all the endpoints can observe is whether or not the end-to-end transmission was successful. Therefore, in the absence of incentives to the contrary, rational (i.e., selfish) intermediate nodes may choose to forward packets at a low priority or simply not forward packets at all. Using a principal-agent model, we show how the hidden-action problem can be overcome through appropriate design of contracts, in both the direct (the endpoints contract with each individual router) and recursive (each router contracts with the next downstream router) cases. We further demonstrate that per-hop monitoring does not necessarily improve the utility of the principal or the social welfare in the system. In addition, we generalize existing mechanisms that deal with hidden-information to handle scenarios involving both hidden-information and hidden-action.},
	keywords = {contracts, hidden-action, incentives, mechanism design, moral-hazard, multi-hop, principal-agent model, routing},
	isbn = {1-59593-049-3},
	doi = {http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/1064009.1064022},
	url = {http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/1064009.1064022},
	author = {Michal Feldman and John Chuang and Ion Stoica and S Shenker}
}

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