Contextually Private Mechanisms

Andreas Haupt and Zo\"e Hitzig

Papers from arXiv.org

Abstract: We introduce a framework for comparing the privacy of different mechanisms. A mechanism designer employs a dynamic protocol to elicit agents' private information. Protocols produce a set of contextual privacy violations -- information learned about agents that may be superfluous given the context. A protocol is maximally contextually private if there is no protocol that produces a subset of the violations it produces, while still implementing the choice rule. We show that selecting a maximally contextually private protocol involves a deliberate decision about whose privacy is most important to protect, and these protocols delay questions to those they aim to protect. Taking the second-price auction rule as an instructive example, we derive two novel designs that are maximally contextually private: the ascending-join and overdescending-join protocols.

Date: 2021-12, Revised 2024-04
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-des and nep-mic
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