Share the multicast payment fairly

Abstract

In this paper, we study how to share the payments to relay links among the receivers for multicast. Based on a strategyproof mechanism whose multicast tree is at most 2 times the optimal, we propose a payment sharing scheme that is 1/n2-budget-balanced, cross-monotonic, and in the core. We also prove that there is no payment sharing scheme that can achieve β-budget-balance and cross-monotonicity for β= Ω(1/n). When both the relay agents and the receivers are selfish, we show a negative result: combining a strategyproof mechanism for the relay agents and a strategyproof sharing scheme for the receivers does not necessarily imply a strategyproof mechanism overall. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2005.