Résumé | In this talk I will give an overview of the role of "incentives" in distributed systems, and how game-theoretic considerations can be used for the analysis of a (distributed) protocol. Roughly speaking, the "participants" of the protocol may deviate from the prescribed "actions" whenever this is convenient for themselves (possibly creating trouble to the overall system).
I will present several applications and examples showing how much incentives can affect the "system performance" and how to cope with that. Along the way, I will discuss how certain "classical" approaches and methods in game theory underly some assumption on distributed system (e.g., synchronization, use of randomness, etc.) and highlight some open questions in this field. |