Network design is a fundamental problem for which it is important to understand the effects of strategic behavior. Given a collection of self-interested agents who want to form a network connecting certain endpoints, the set of stable solutions — the Nash equilibria — may look quite different from the centrally enforced optimum. We study the quality of the best Nash equilibrium, and refer to the ratio of its cost to the optimum network cost as the price of stability. The best Nash equilibrium solution has a natural meaning of stability in this context — it is the optimal solution that can be proposed from which no user will “defect”.

christos @ cs.berkeley.edu

We study the degradation in network performance caused by the selfish behavior of noncooperative network users. We consider a model of selfish routing in which the latency experienced by network traffic on an edge of the network is a function of the edge congestion, and network users are assumed to selfishly route traffic on minimumlatency paths. The quality of a routing of traffic is measured by the sum of travel times, also called the total latency. The outcome of selfish routing—a Nash equilibrium—does not in general minimize the total latency; hence, selfish behavior carries the cost of decreased network performance. We quantify this degradation in network performance via the price of anarchy, the worst-possible ratio between the total latency of a Nash equilibrium and of an optimal routing of the traffic. We show the price of anarchy is determined only by the simplest of networks. Specifically, we prove that under weak hypotheses on the class of allowable edge latency functions, the worst-case ratio between the total latency of a Nash equilibrium and of a minimum-latency routing for any multicommodity flow network is achieved by a singlecommodity

We study the problem of traffic routing in non-cooperative networks. In such networks, users may follow selfish strategies to optimize their own performance measure and therefore their behavior does not have to lead to optimal performance of the entire network. In this paper we investigate the worst-case coordination ratio, which is a game theoretic measure aiming to reflect the price of selfish routing. Following a line of previous work, we focus on the most basic networks consisting of parallel links with linear latency functions. Our main result is that the worst-case coordination ratio on m parallel links of possibly different speeds is logm Θ log log logm In fact, we are able to give an exact description of the worst-case coordination ratio depending on the number of links and the ratio of the speed of the fastest link over the speed of the slowest link. For example, for the special case in which all m parallel links have the same speed, we can prove that the worst-case coordination ratio is Γ (−1) (m) + Θ(1) with Γ denoting the Gamma (factorial) function. Our bounds entirely resolve an open problem posed recently by Koutsoupias and Papadimitriou [KP99].

We introduce a simple network design game that models how independent selfish agents can build or maintain a large network. In our game every agent has a specific connectivity requirement, i.e. each agent has a set of terminals and wants to build a network in which his terminals are connected. Possible edges in the network have costs and each agent’s goal is to pay as little as possible. Determining whether or not a Nash equilibrium exists in this game is NP-complete. However, when the goal of each player is to connect a terminal to a common source, we prove that there is a Nash equilibrium as cheap as the optimal network, and give a polynomial time algorithm to find a (1 + ε)-approximate Nash equilibrium that does not cost much more. For the general connection game we prove that there is a 3-approximate Nash equilibrium that is as cheap as the optimal network, and give an algorithm to find a (4.65 + ε)-approximate Nash equilibrium that does not cost much more.

Abstract We consider the price of anarchy of pure Nash equilibria in congestion games with linearlatency functions. For asymmetric games, the price of anarchy of maximum social cost is \Theta (p N),where N is the number of players. For all other cases of symmetric or asymmetric games andfor both maximum and average social cost, the price of anarchy is 5 /2. We extend the results tolatency functions that are polynomials of bounded degree. We also extend some of the results to mixed Nash equilibria.

What is the price of anarchy when unsplittable demands are routed selfishly in general networks with load-dependent edge delays? Motivated by this question we generalize the model of [14] to the case of weighted congestion games. We show that varying demands of users crucially affect the nature of these games, which are no longer isomorphic to exact potential games, even for very simple instances. Indeed we construct examples where even a single-commodity (weighted) network congestion game may have no pure Nash equilibrium.

We study a network creation game recently proposed by Fabrikant, Luthra, Maneva, Papadimitriou and Shenker. In this game, each player (vertex) can create links (edges) to other players at a cost of α per edge. The goal of every player is to minimize the sum consisting of (a) the cost of the links he has created and (b) the sum of the distances to all other players. Fabrikant et al. conjectured that there exists a constant A such that, for any α> A, all non-transient Nash equilibria graphs are trees. They showed that if a Nash equilibrium is a tree, the price of anarchy is constant. In this paper we disprove the tree conjecture. More precisely, we show that for any positive integer n0, there exists a graph built by n ≥ n0 players which contains cycles and forms a nontransient

We consider sel sh routing over a network consisting of m parallel links through which n sel sh users route their tra c trying to minimize their own expected latency. Westudy the class of mixed strategies in which the expected latency through each link is at most a constant multiple of the optimum maximum latency had global regulation been available. For the case of uniform links it is known that all Nash equilibria belong to this class of strategies. We areinterested in bounding the coordination ratio (or price of anarchy) of these strategies de ned as the worst-case ratio of the maximum (over all links) expected latency over the optimum maximum latency. The load balancing aspect of the problem immediately implies a lower bound; lnm ln lnm of the coordination ratio. We give a tight (uptoamultiplicative constant) upper bound. To show the upper bound, we analyze a variant ofthe classical balls and bins problem, in which balls with arbitrary weights are placed into bins according to arbitrary probability distributions. At the heart of our approach is a new probabilistic tool that we call

Abstract not found