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posted by cmn32480 on Saturday September 24 2016, @03:51AM   Printer-friendly
from the where-to-make-the-dump dept.

A functioning society requires various public services, such as hospitals, schools, landfills, etc., but deciding where to build them can be a complicated and contentious issue. The cost to build them are typically shared across society in the form of taxes, and deciding where they go involves various optimizations and tradeoffs to maximize their impact on society while minimizing the cost to society. Optimizing this kind of decision making is an active research topic in the field of algorithmic and network game theory.

A very common approach is to address the issue from a centralized, top-down perspective whereby a city planner considers the network of society as a whole, and inputs the pros and cons into a global optimization algorithm to find a minimum cost solution. This approach is known to not provide the most optimal solution. Another approach is to let individual agents make decisions in best response to the choices of their neighbors. For instance, if a region can access a hospital in a neighboring region, then they would have little motivation to want to have a hospital built in their region; however if none of their neighbors have a hospital, then they would be more likely to be willing to have one built in their region. Although this sounds more appealing than the top-down approach, this approach is also known to not be very socially efficient.

Yi-Fan Sun and Hai-Jun Zhou from the Chinese Academy of Sciences have published an open access paper in Nature's Scientific Reports that considers a cooperative decision process where global decisions are made via local consensus.

Briefly speaking, the basic rules are that agents in need of service recommend their network neighbors of highest local impact (to be precisely defined later) as candidate service providers, and an agent may be chosen as a service provider only if all its non-server neighbors are happy with this appointment. This distributed selection mechanism does not require the global structural information of the system but only involves local-scale information exchange. Yet very encouragingly we find that it leads to socially efficient solutions with tax level approaching the lowest possible value.

[Continues...]

In their idealized model they only considered construction costs to build the facilities and not other imposed societal effects such as changes in traffic patterns or local environment impacts. It is hard to say how well this approach would work in practice, but it would be interesting to see whether NIMBYism is borne out of a true opposition to an issue, or whether it is more rooted in the fact that centralized decisions get imposed upon locals without much consideration of their input. Regardless of whether this approach would work with humans, it is directly relevant to AI research such as robot swarms for finding efficient mechanisms for global decision making.

From the theoretical point of view, the demonstrated excellent performance of the local-consensus mechanism is very encouraging. Our work suggests that it is theoretically possible to efficiently solve the service location problem by distributed decision-making. The local-consensus mechanism does not need a central planner and it does not require the structural knowledge about the whole network. Furthermore, every agent participates in the decision-making process and its opinion has been incorporated in the final cooperative solution, which may help stabilizing the solution.

From the paper's abstract:

We discuss the issue of distributed and cooperative decision-making in a network game of public service location. Each node of the network can decide to host a certain public service incurring in a construction cost and serving all the neighboring nodes and itself. A pure consumer node has to pay a tax, and the collected tax is evenly distributed to all the hosting nodes to remedy their construction costs. If all nodes make individual best-response decisions, the system gets trapped in an inefficient situation of high tax level. Here we introduce a decentralized local-consensus selection mechanism which requires nodes to recommend their neighbors of highest local impact as candidate servers, and a node may become a server only if all its non-server neighbors give their assent. We demonstrate that although this mechanism involves only information exchange among neighboring nodes, it leads to socially efficient solutions with tax level approaching the lowest possible value. Our results may help in understanding and improving collective problem-solving in various networked social and robotic systems.


Original Submission

 
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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday September 24 2016, @10:31AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Saturday September 24 2016, @10:31AM (#405892)

    It's too bad the founders didn't foresee the problem of the imperial president who ignores congress and rules by executive order. It's too bad there were historical precedents they should have known about like those wacky roman emperors who ignored the senate. It's too bad the united kingdom eventually evolved a parliamentary system which fixed all of the grievances of the declaration of independence while also making the prime minister answerable to parliament.

  • (Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Saturday September 24 2016, @10:48AM

    by The Mighty Buzzard (18) Subscriber Badge <themightybuzzard@proton.me> on Saturday September 24 2016, @10:48AM (#405895) Homepage Journal

    while also making the prime minister answerable to parliament.

    Works in theory. Then again, the President is also answerable to Congress for any illegal conduct. In theory.

    --
    My rights don't end where your fear begins.
    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday September 24 2016, @10:52AM

      by Anonymous Coward on Saturday September 24 2016, @10:52AM (#405897)

      In practice, the Prime Minister is a Member of Parliament.
      In practice, the Cabinet is composed of Members of Parliament.
      In practice, the Executive is a subset of the Legislature.

    • (Score: 2) by Phoenix666 on Saturday September 24 2016, @11:21AM

      by Phoenix666 (552) on Saturday September 24 2016, @11:21AM (#405902) Journal

      The Gang of Thieves in DC has no interest in prosecuting one of its members. That might lead to other members being prosecuted as well. Better to go along and keep the gravy train rolling for all. Else, they might have to work for a living and actually earn their bread, instead of having an unlimited expense account courtesy of the little people. Also, the chicks. The chicks don't come around unless you have a car with a driver. No more needs to be said.

      --
      Washington DC delenda est.
    • (Score: 2) by Phoenix666 on Saturday September 24 2016, @11:23AM

      by Phoenix666 (552) on Saturday September 24 2016, @11:23AM (#405904) Journal

      I'd note that if Bush & Cheney and Obama weren't impeached for their crimes, then no president ever will be.

      --
      Washington DC delenda est.
  • (Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday September 24 2016, @08:21PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Saturday September 24 2016, @08:21PM (#406031)

    didn't foresee the problem of the imperial president who ignores congress

    They did. Then congress and the senate abdicated their roll to the president slowly over the years.

    In fact with the previous version of our constitution they gave a lot of power to the president of the senate (now what we call the vice president). They quickly realized that the running of the state and the rule making of the state needed to be separate. Our senators and congressmen over the years gave more and more power over to the president because they didnt want to deal with it, or were buying some favor. Nothing in the constitution against it but very much against the spirit of what they were doing. Such as things like 'fast track'.