Conjecture on milder incentive effects with cost–speed trade-offs

Prove or refute the conjecture that, in a model where agents can incur higher computation costs to deliver faster solutions (i.e., a cost–speed trade-off), the impact of strategic incentives on decentralization and efficiency is milder than in the fixed cost–time model analyzed in the paper.

Background

The model in the paper assumes each agent has a fixed cost to produce a solution at a fixed time, which leads to strong impossibility results for combining decentralization and efficiency under non-revelation mechanisms.

The authors suggest exploring a richer model where agents may trade off higher costs for faster solutions and conjecture that incentives would have a milder effect in such a setting, implying potentially improved compatibility between decentralization and efficiency.