Cryptography and mechanism design
Moni Naor · Theoretical Aspects of Rationality and Knowledge · 2001
Mechanism Design is the algorithmic component of Game Theory, the synthesis of protocols for selfish parties to achieve certain properties. A protocol is a method to aggregate the preferences of the parties in order to decide on some choice, where typical examples include: deciding whether a community should build a bridge, how to route packets in a network and deciding who wins an auction. Each party has a utility function which expresses how much it values each possible outcome of the protocol. The goal is to design a protocol where the winning strategies achieve the social choice. Recently Mechanism Design has received attention by computer scientists in light of the above applications, see [19, 20].