Proceedings of the thirty-fifth annual ACM symposium on Theory of computing
The Price of Stability for Network Design with Fair Cost Allocation
FOCS '04 Proceedings of the 45th Annual IEEE Symposium on Foundations of Computer Science
A general approach to online network optimization problems
ACM Transactions on Algorithms (TALG)
Online primal-dual algorithms for covering and packing problems
ESA'05 Proceedings of the 13th annual European conference on Algorithms
Coordination mechanisms for selfish scheduling
WINE'05 Proceedings of the First international conference on Internet and Network Economics
Non-Cooperative Multicast and Facility Location Games
IEEE Journal on Selected Areas in Communications
Minimal subsidies in expense sharing games
SAGT'10 Proceedings of the Third international conference on Algorithmic game theory
On the impact of local taxes in a set cover game
SIROCCO'10 Proceedings of the 17th international conference on Structural Information and Communication Complexity
The snowball effect of uncertainty in potential games
WINE'11 Proceedings of the 7th international conference on Internet and Network Economics
LP-Based covering games with low price of anarchy
WINE'12 Proceedings of the 8th international conference on Internet and Network Economics
ACM Transactions on Economics and Computation
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We consider a cost sharing system where users are selfish and act according to their own interest. There is a set of facilities and each facility provides services to a subset of the users. Each user is interested in purchasing a service, and will buy it from the facility offering it at the lowest cost. The notion of social welfareis defined to be the total cost of the facilities chosen by the users. A central authority can encourage the purchase of services by offering subsidies that reduce their price, in order to improve the social welfare. The subsidies are financed by taxes collected from the users. Specifically, we investigate a non-cooperative game, where users join the system, and act according to their best response. We model the system as an instance of a set cover game, where each element is interested in selecting a cover minimizing its payment. The subsidies are updated dynamically, following the selfish moves of the elements and the taxes collected due to their payments. Our objective is to design a dynamicsubsidy mechanism that improves on the social welfare while collecting as taxes only a small fraction of the sum of the payments of the users. The performance of such a subsidy mechanism is thus defined by two different quality parameters: (i) the price of anarchy, defined as the ratio between the social welfare cost of the Nash equilibrium obtained and the cost of an optimal solution; and (ii) the taxation ratio, defined as the fraction of payments collected as taxes from the users.