Can the Max-Min Fairness-Based Coalitional Mechanism in Competitive Networks be Trustful?

In resource exchange networks, nodes or agents may cooperate or compete with each other to maximize their own profits. In competitive networks, they may determine their exchange strategy selfishly, which makes it a challenge problem to design fair and efficient cooperation strategy. A popular resource exchanging mechanism called Max-Min Fairness-Based Coalitional (MMFC) is proposed in [1] to solve the problem in competitive networks, however it is still an open problem whether the mechanism is trustful if an agent lies about its resource information. In this paper, we demonstrate the trustfulness of the MMFC mechanism; combining theoretical analyses and numerical examples, we show that an agent cannot gain more benefit by misreporting its resource information.