Abstract
Congestion games model several interesting applications, including routing and network formation games, and also possess attractive theoretical properties, including the existence of and convergence of natural dynamics to a pure Nash equilibrium. Weighted variants of congestion games that rely on sharing costs proportional to players’ weights do not generally have pure-strategy Nash equilibria. We propose a new way of assigning costs to players with weights in congestion games that recovers the important properties of the unweighted model. This method is derived from the Shapley value, and it always induces a game with a (weighted) potential function. For the special cases of weighted network cost-sharing and atomic selfish routing games (with Shapley value-based cost shares), we prove tight bounds on the price of stability and price of anarchy, respectively.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution.
Buying options
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Learn about institutional subscriptionsPreview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
References
Aland, S., Dumrauf, D., Gairing, M., Monien, B., Schoppmann, F.: Exact price of anarchy for polynomial congestion games. In: Durand, B., Thomas, W. (eds.) STACS 2006. LNCS, vol. 3884, pp. 218–229. Springer, Heidelberg (2006)
Anshelevich, E., Dasgupta, A., Kleinberg, J., Tardos, É., Wexler, T., Roughgarden, T.: The price of stability for network design with fair cost allocation. SIAM Journal on Computing 38(4), 1602–1623 (2008)
Awerbuch, B., Azar, Y., Epstein, A.: The price of routing unsplittable flow. In: STOC, pp. 57–66 (2005)
Bhawalkar, K., Gairing, M., Roughgarden, T.: Weighted congestion games: Price of anarchy, universal worst-case examples, and tightness. In: de Berg, M., Meyer, U. (eds.) ESA 2010. LNCS, vol. 6347, pp. 17–28. Springer, Heidelberg (2010)
Chen, H., Roughgarden, T.: Network design with weighted players. Theory of Computing Systems 45(2), 302–324 (2009)
Chen, H., Roughgarden, T., Valiant, G.: Designing network protocols for good equilibria. SIAM Journal on Computing 39(5), 1799–1832 (2010)
Fotakis, D., Kontogiannis, S.C., Spirakis, P.G.: Selfish unsplittable flows. Theoretical Computer Science 348(2-3), 226–239 (2005)
Gairing, M., Schoppmann, F.: Total latency in singleton congestion games. In: Deng, X., Graham, F.C. (eds.) WINE 2007. LNCS, vol. 4858, pp. 381–387. Springer, Heidelberg (2007)
Goemans, M.X., Mirrokni, V., Vetta, A.: Sink equilibria and convergence. In: FOCS, pp. 142–151 (2005)
Harks, T., Klimm, M.: On the existence of pure Nash equilibria in weighted congestion games. In: Abramsky, S., Gavoille, C., Kirchner, C., Meyer auf der Heide, F., Spirakis, P.G. (eds.) ICALP 2010. LNCS, vol. 6198, pp. 79–89. Springer, Heidelberg (2010)
Hart, S., Mas-Colell, A.: Potential, value, and consistency. Econometrica 57(3), 589–614 (1989)
Kalai, E., Samet, D.: On weighted Shapley values. International Journal of Game Theory 16(3), 205–222 (1987)
Milchtaich, I.: Congestion games with player-specific payoff functions. Games and Economic Behavior 13(1), 111–124 (1996)
Monderer, D., Shapley, L.S.: Fictitious play property for games with identical interests. Journal of Economic Theory 68, 258–265 (1996)
Monderer, D., Shapley, L.S.: Potential games. Games and Economic Behavior 14(1), 124–143 (1996)
Mosk-Aoyama, D., Roughgarden, T.: Worst-case efficiency analysis of queueing disciplines. In: Albers, S., Marchetti-Spaccamela, A., Matias, Y., Nikoletseas, S., Thomas, W. (eds.) ICALP 2009. LNCS, vol. 5556, pp. 546–557. Springer, Heidelberg (2009)
Moulin, H.: The price of anarchy of serial, average and incremental cost sharing. Economic Theory 36(3), 379–405 (2008)
Osborne, M.J., Rubinstein, A.: A Course in Game Theory. MIT Press, Cambridge (1994)
Rosenthal, R.W.: A class of games possessing pure-strategy Nash equilibria. International Journal of Game Theory 2(1), 65–67 (1973)
Rosenthal, R.W.: The network equilibrium problem in integers. Networks 3(1), 53–59 (1973)
Roughgarden, T.: Intrinsic robustness of the price of anarchy. In: STOC, pp. 513–522 (2009)
Roughgarden, T., Tardos, É.: How bad is selfish routing? Journal of the ACM 49(2), 236–259 (2002)
Shapley, L.S.: Additive and Non-Additive Set Functions. PhD thesis, Department of Mathematics, Princeton University (1953)
Shenker, S.J.: Making greed work in networks: A game-theoretic analysis of switch service disciplines. IEEE/ACM Transactions on Networking 3(6), 819–831 (1995)
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2011 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg
About this paper
Cite this paper
Kollias, K., Roughgarden, T. (2011). Restoring Pure Equilibria to Weighted Congestion Games. In: Aceto, L., Henzinger, M., Sgall, J. (eds) Automata, Languages and Programming. ICALP 2011. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 6756. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-22012-8_43
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-22012-8_43
Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg
Print ISBN: 978-3-642-22011-1
Online ISBN: 978-3-642-22012-8
eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)