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657
Worst-case equilibria
- IN PROCEEDINGS OF THE 16TH ANNUAL SYMPOSIUM ON THEORETICAL ASPECTS OF COMPUTER SCIENCE
, 1999
"... In a system in which noncooperative agents share a common resource, we propose the ratio between the worst possible Nash equilibrium and the social optimum as a measure of the effectiveness of the system. Deriving upper and lower bounds for this ratio in a model in which several agents share a ver ..."
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Cited by 847 (17 self)
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In a system in which noncooperative agents share a common resource, we propose the ratio between the worst possible Nash equilibrium and the social optimum as a measure of the effectiveness of the system. Deriving upper and lower bounds for this ratio in a model in which several agents share a very simple network leads to some interesting mathematics, results, and open problems.
Sprite: A Simple, Cheat-Proof, Credit-Based System for Mobile Ad-Hoc Networks
- in Proceedings of IEEE INFOCOM
, 2002
"... Mobile ad hoc networking has been an active research area for several years. How to stimulate cooperation among selfish mobile nodes, however, is not well addressed yet. In this paper, we propose Sprite, a simple, cheat-proof, creditbased system for stimulating cooperation among selfish nodes in mob ..."
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Cited by 484 (17 self)
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Mobile ad hoc networking has been an active research area for several years. How to stimulate cooperation among selfish mobile nodes, however, is not well addressed yet. In this paper, we propose Sprite, a simple, cheat-proof, creditbased system for stimulating cooperation among selfish nodes in mobile ad hoc networks. Our system provides incentive for mobile nodes to cooperate and report actions honestly. Compared with previous approaches, our system does not require any tamperproof hardware at any node. Furthermore, we present a formal model of our system and prove its properties. Evaluations of a prototype implementation show that the overhead of our system is small. Simulations and analysis show that mobile nodes can cooperate and forward each other's messages, unless the resource of each node is extremely low.
The price of stability for network design with fair cost allocation
- In Proceedings of the 45th Annual Symposium on Foundations of Computer Science (FOCS
, 2004
"... Abstract. 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 differ ..."
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Cited by 281 (30 self)
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Abstract. 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. We consider the price of stability for network design with respect to one of the most widely-studied protocols for network cost allocation, in which the cost of each edge is divided equally between users whose connections make use of it; this fair-division scheme can be derived from the Shapley value, and has a number of basic economic motivations. We show that the price of stability for network design with respect to this fair cost allocation is O(log k), where k is the number of users, and that a good Nash equilibrium can be achieved via best-response dynamics in which users iteratively defect from a starting solution. This establishes that the fair cost allocation protocol is in fact a useful mechanism for inducing strategic behavior to form near-optimal equilibria. We discuss connections to the class of potential games defined by Monderer and Shapley, and extend our results to cases in which users are seeking to balance network design costs with latencies in the constructed network, with stronger results when the network has only delays and no construction costs. We also present bounds on the convergence time of best-response dynamics, and discuss extensions to a weighted game.
A BGP-based Mechanism for Lowest-Cost Routing
, 2002
"... The routing of traffic between... this paper, we address the problem of interdomain routing from a mechanism-design point of view. The application of mechanism-design principles to the study of routing is the subject of earlier work by Nisan and Ronen [15] and Hershberger and Suri [11]. In this pape ..."
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Cited by 268 (16 self)
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The routing of traffic between... this paper, we address the problem of interdomain routing from a mechanism-design point of view. The application of mechanism-design principles to the study of routing is the subject of earlier work by Nisan and Ronen [15] and Hershberger and Suri [11]. In this paper, we formulate and solve a version of the routing-mechanism design problem that is different from the previously studied version in three ways that make it more accurately reflective of real-world interdomain routing: (1) we treat the nodes as strategic agents, rather than the links; (2) our mechanism computes lowest-cost routes for all source-destination pairs and payments for transit nodes on all of the routes (rather than computing routes and payments for only one source-destination pair at a time, as is done in [15,11]); (3) we show how to compute our mechanism with a distributed algorithm that is a straightforward extension to BGP and causes only modest increases in routingtable size and convergence time (in contrast with the centralized algorithms used in [15,11]). This approach of using an existing protocol as a substrate for distributed computation may prove useful in future development of Internet algorithms generally, not only for routing or pricing problems. Our design and analysis of a strategyproof, BGP-based routing mechanism provides a new, promising direction in distributed algorithmic mechanism design, which has heretofore been focused mainly on multicast cost sharing.
Selfish Routing and the Price of Anarchy
- MATHEMATICAL PROGRAMMING SOCIETY NEWSLETTER
, 2007
"... Selfish routing is a classical mathematical model of how self-interested users might route traffic through a congested network. The outcome of selfish routing is generally inefficient, in that it fails to optimize natural objective functions. The price of anarchy is a quantitative measure of this in ..."
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Cited by 255 (11 self)
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Selfish routing is a classical mathematical model of how self-interested users might route traffic through a congested network. The outcome of selfish routing is generally inefficient, in that it fails to optimize natural objective functions. The price of anarchy is a quantitative measure of this inefficiency. We survey recent work that analyzes the price of anarchy of selfish routing. We also describe related results on bounding the worst-possible severity of a phenomenon called Braess’s Paradox, and on three techniques for reducing the price of anarchy of selfish routing. This survey concentrates on the contributions of the author’s PhD thesis, but also discusses several more recent results in the area.
On a network creation game
- in Proceedings of the 22nd Annual Symposium on Principles of Distributed Computing
, 2003
"... christos @ cs.berkeley.edu ..."
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Truth revelation in approximately efficient combinatorial auctions
- Journal of the ACM
, 2002
"... Abstract. Some important classical mechanisms considered in Microeconomics and Game Theory require the solution of a difficult optimization problem. This is true of mechanisms for combinatorial auctions, which have in recent years assumed practical importance, and in particular of the gold standard ..."
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Cited by 230 (1 self)
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Abstract. Some important classical mechanisms considered in Microeconomics and Game Theory require the solution of a difficult optimization problem. This is true of mechanisms for combinatorial auctions, which have in recent years assumed practical importance, and in particular of the gold standard for combinatorial auctions, the Generalized Vickrey Auction (GVA). Traditional analysis of these mechanisms—in particular, their truth revelation properties—assumes that the optimization problems are solved precisely. In reality, these optimization problems can usually be solved only in an approximate fashion. We investigate the impact on such mechanisms of replacing exact solutions by approximate ones. Specifically, we look at a particular greedy optimization method. We show that the GVA payment scheme does not provide for a truth revealing mechanism. We introduce another scheme that does guarantee truthfulness for a restricted class of players. We demonstrate the latter property by identifying natural properties for combinatorial auctions and showing that, for our restricted class of players, they imply that truthful strategies are dominant. Those properties have applicability beyond the specific auction studied.
The price of anarchy is independent of the network topology
- JOURNAL OF COMPUTER AND SYSTEM SCIENCES
, 2002
"... 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 ..."
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Cited by 217 (17 self)
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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
Efficiency Loss in a Network Resource Allocation Game: The Case of Elastic Supply
, 2008
"... We consider a resource allocation problem where individual users wish to send data across a network to maximize their utility, and a cost is incurred at each link that depends on the total rate sent through the link. It is known that as long as users do not anticipate the effect of their actions on ..."
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Cited by 211 (12 self)
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We consider a resource allocation problem where individual users wish to send data across a network to maximize their utility, and a cost is incurred at each link that depends on the total rate sent through the link. It is known that as long as users do not anticipate the effect of their actions on prices, a simple proportional pricing mechanism can maximize the sum of users’ utilities minus the cost (called aggregate surplus). Continuing previous efforts to quantify the effects of selfish behavior in network pricing mechanisms, we consider the possibility that users anticipate the effect of their actions on link prices. Under the assumption that the links’ marginal cost functions are convex, we establish existence of a Nash equilibrium. We show that the aggregate surplus at a Nash equilibrium is no worse than a factor of 4 √ 2 − 5 times the optimal aggregate surplus; thus, the efficiency loss when users are selfish is no more than approximately 34%.
