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Optimal Cost-Sharing in Weighted Congestion Games

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Web and Internet Economics (WINE 2014)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNISA,volume 8877))

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Abstract

We identify how to share costs locally in weighted congestion games with polynomial cost functions in order to minimize the worst-case price of anarchy (PoA). First, we prove that among all cost-sharing methods that guarantee the existence of pure Nash equilibria, the Shapley value minimizes the worst-case PoA. Second, if the guaranteed existence condition is dropped, then the proportional cost-sharing method minimizes the worst-case PoA over all cost-sharing methods. As a byproduct of our results, we obtain the first PoA analysis of the simple marginal contribution cost-sharing rule, and prove that marginal cost taxes are ineffective for improving equilibria in (atomic) congestion games.

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Stanford University, Stanford, CA, 94305, USA

    Vasilis Gkatzelis, Konstantinos Kollias & Tim Roughgarden

Authors
  1. Vasilis Gkatzelis
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  2. Konstantinos Kollias
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  3. Tim Roughgarden
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Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. Microsoft Research, Haidian District, 100080, Beijing, China

    Tie-Yan Liu

  2. The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, Kowloon, Hong Kong

    Qi Qi

  3. Deptartment of Management Science and Engineering, Stanford University, 94305-4121, Stanford, CA, USA

    Yinyu Ye

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Gkatzelis, V., Kollias, K., Roughgarden, T. (2014). Optimal Cost-Sharing in Weighted Congestion Games. In: Liu, TY., Qi, Q., Ye, Y. (eds) Web and Internet Economics. WINE 2014. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 8877. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-13129-0_6

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-13129-0_6

  • Publisher Name: Springer, Cham

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-319-13128-3

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-319-13129-0

  • eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)

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