Privacy and Mechanism Design

Understand

This paper is a survey of recent work at the intersection of mechanism design and privacy.

• The connection is a natural one, but its study has been jump-started in recent years by the advent of differential privacy, which provides a rigorous, quantitative way of reasoning about the costs that an agent might experience because of the loss of his privacy.
• Here, we survey several facets of this study, and differential privacy plays a role in more than one way.
• Of course, it provides us a basis for modeling agent costs for privacy, which is essential if we are to attempt mechanism design in a setting in which agents have preferences for privacy.