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Designing Local Distributed Mechanisms

Authors Juho Hirvonen , Sara Ranjbaran

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LIPIcs.DISC.2026.24.pdf
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ACM Subject Classification
  • Theory of computation → Algorithmic mechanism design
  • Theory of computation → Distributed computing models
Keywords
  • local algorithms
  • game theory
  • algorithmic mechanism design

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Abstract

Mechanism design studies algorithms as games with the goal of designing algorithms that incentivise participants to be truthful: to behave according to their real preferences. In this work we introduce a new notion: local distributed mechanisms. These are truthful mechanisms that have an implementation as fast distributed algorithms and have non-trivial approximation guarantees. We show how monotone distributed optimisation algorithms can be automatically transformed into truthful mechanisms using the seminal result known as Myerson’s Lemma. We demonstrate mechanisms for four fundamental graph problems: maximum-weight independent set, minimum-weight vertex cover, minimum-weight dominating set, and a variant of weighted colouring.
We study distributed mechanism design in two settings. In the trusted setting we are only interested in a distributed implementation of a mechanism and assume that the algorithm is executed correctly. We also study what happens when the strategic agents themselves are responsible for running the algorithm, and show that a large class of algorithms cannot be implemented. Despite this impossibility, we are able to design a non-trivial incentive-compatible mechanism for weighted independent set problem.
Our work extends previous work in Distributed Algorithmic Mechanism Design (DAMD) in a new direction. Instead of studying global problems like routing or leader election, we study local resource allocation problems. Our algorithms are simple and thus potentially practical. Local algorithms are particularly interesting for highly dynamic large-scale systems, and there are many potential future application domains, e.g. demand-side load management in electric grids or resource allocation in IoT computing.

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Juho Hirvonen and Sara Ranjbaran. Designing Local Distributed Mechanisms. In 40th International Symposium on Distributed Computing (DISC 2026). Leibniz International Proceedings in Informatics (LIPIcs), Volume 397, pp. 24:1-24:22, Schloss Dagstuhl – Leibniz-Zentrum für Informatik (2026) https://doi.org/10.4230/LIPIcs.DISC.2026.24

Author Details

Juho Hirvonen
  • Aalto University, Finland
  • Helsinki Institute for Information Technology HIIT, Finland
Sara Ranjbaran
  • Aalto University, Finland

Acknowledgements

We thank the anonymous reviewers for their valuable feedback. We thank Dennis Olivetti for pointing out the connection between colourings and orientations of bounded length. We thank Daniel Hauser, Mitri Kitti, Pauli Murto, Jukka Suomela, and Juuso Välimäki for discussions.

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