More than Privacy: Adopting Differential Privacy in Game-theoretic Mechanism Design

The vast majority of artificial intelligence solutions are founded on game theory, and differential privacy is emerging as perhaps the most rigorous and widely adopted privacy paradigm in the field. However, alongside all the advancements made in both these fields, there is not a single application that is not still vulnerable to privacy violations, security breaches, or manipulation by adversaries. Our understanding of the interactions between differential privacy and game theoretic solutions is limited. Hence, we undertook a comprehensive review of literature in the field, finding that differential privacy has several advantageous properties that can make more of a contribution to game theory than just privacy protection. It can also be used to build heuristic models for game-theoretic solutions, to avert strategic manipulations, and to quantify the cost of privacy protection. With a focus on mechanism design, the aim of this article is to provide a new perspective on the currently held impossibilities in game theory, potential avenues to circumvent those impossibilities, and opportunities to improve the performance of game-theoretic solutions with differentially private techniques.