arXiv subjects

Praphul Chandra

Publications and source records attributed to Praphul Chandra.

4 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2026

Resourced Authority A Mechanism-Design Model for Participatory Governance of Deployed AI Agents

We give a formal mechanism design model for the continuous participatory governance of a deployed AI agent. The mechanism is built on the principle that governance should control an AI agent through resource allocation so as to make authorization self enforcing via compute budgets. The mechanism seeks to establish the Safe AI paradigm that compute is an effective governance lever. We situate our work as a compliance or commons overlay on a deployer. One governance period is an extensive form game in which verified human stakeholders arrive sequentially and contribute, on a provision or a rejection market, in a governance currency that is deliberately distinct from the agents compute. A funding aggregator turns raw contributions into breadth weighted effective supports - a two threshold gate with hysteresis converts net support into a binary authorization that, through a coupling map bounded by an exogenously certified safety ceiling, releases a metered compute budget - realized in hardware as a signed compute license so that the decision is self-enforcing. We characterize the class of agents the mechanism can govern and isolate manipulation of the governing electorate by the governed agent as the central open problem. We also introduce several challenges addressing manipulation of governing electorate by the governed agents.

cs.GT↗

arXiv2019

Civic Crowdfunding for Agents with Negative Valuations and Agents with Asymmetric Beliefs

In the last decade, civic crowdfunding has proved to be effective in generating funds for the provision of public projects. However, the existing literature deals only with citizen's with positive valuation and symmetric belief towards the project's provision. In this work, we present novel mechanisms which break these two barriers, i.e., mechanisms which incorporate negative valuation and asymmetric belief, independently. For negative valuation, we present a methodology for converting existing mechanisms to mechanisms that incorporate agents with negative valuations. Particularly, we adapt existing PPR and PPS mechanisms, to present novel PPRN and PPSN mechanisms which incentivize strategic agents to contribute to the project based on their true preference. With respect to asymmetric belief, we propose a reward scheme Belief Based Reward (BBR) based on Robust Bayesian Truth Serum mechanism. With BBR, we propose a general mechanism for civic crowdfunding which incorporates asymmetric agents. We leverage PPR and PPS, to present PPRx and PPSx. We prove that in PPRx and PPSx, agents with greater belief towards the project's provision contribute more than agents with lesser belief. Further, we also show that contributions are such that the project is provisioned at equilibrium.

cs.GT↗

arXiv2018

Designing Refund Bonus Schemes for Provision Point Mechanism in Civic Crowdfunding

Civic crowdfunding (CC) is a popular medium for raising funds for civic projects from interested agents. With Blockchains gaining traction, we can implement CC in a reliable, transparent, and secure manner with smart contracts (SCs). The fundamental challenge in CC is free-riding. PPR, the proposal by Zubrickas [23] of giving refund bonus to the contributors, in the case of the project not getting provisioned, has attractive properties. However, as observed by Chandra et al. [7], PPR faces a challenge wherein the agents defer their contribution until the deadline. We define this delaying of contributions as a race condition. To address this, their proposal, PPS, considers the temporal aspects of a contribution. However, PPS is computationally complex, expensive to implement as an SC, and it being sophisticated, it is difficult to explain to a layperson. In this work, our goal is to identify all essential properties a refund bonus scheme must satisfy in order to curb free-riding while avoiding the race condition. We prove Contribution Monotonicity and Time Monotonicity are sufficient conditions for this. We propose three elegant refund bonus schemes satisfying these two conditions leading to three novel mechanisms for CC - PPRG, PPRE, and PPRP. We show that PPRG is the most cost-effective mechanism when deployed as an SC. We show that under certain modest assumptions on valuations of the agents, in PPRG, the project is funded at equilibrium.

cs.GT↗

arXiv2016

Referral-Embedded Provision Point Mechanisms for Crowdfunding of Public Projects

Civic Crowdfunding is emerging as a popular means to mobilize funding from citizens for public projects. A popular mechanism deployed on civic crowdfunding platforms is a provision point mechanism, wherein, the total contributions must reach a predetermined threshold in order for the project to be provisioned (undertaken). Such a mechanism may have multiple equilibria; unfortunately, in many of these equilibria, the project is not funded even if it is highly valued among the agents. Recent work has proposed mechanisms with refund bonuses where the project gets funded in equilibrium if its net value is higher than a threshold among the agents who are aware of the crowdfunding effort. In this paper, we formalize the notion of social desirability of a public project and propose mechanisms which use the idea of referrals to expand the pool of participants and achieve an equilibrium in which the project gets funded if its net value exceeds a threshold among the entire agent population. We call this new class of mechanisms Referral-Embedded Provision Point Mechanisms (REPPM). We specifically propose two variants of REPPM and both these mechanisms have the remarkable property that, at equilibrium, referral bonuses are offered but there is no need for actual payment of these bonuses. We establish that any given agent's equilibrium strategy is to refer other agents and to contribute in proportion to the agent's true value for the project. By referring others to contribute, an agent can, in fact, reduce his equilibrium contribution. In our view, the proposed mechanisms will lead to an increase in the number of projects that are funded on civic crowdfunding platforms.

cs.GT↗