Journal of the ACM (JACM)
The complexity of pure Nash equilibria
STOC '04 Proceedings of the thirty-sixth annual ACM symposium on Theory of computing
The price of anarchy of finite congestion games
Proceedings of the thirty-seventh annual ACM symposium on Theory of computing
Congestion games with failures
Proceedings of the 6th ACM conference on Electronic commerce
Computing Equilibria in Anonymous Games
FOCS '07 Proceedings of the 48th Annual IEEE Symposium on Foundations of Computer Science
Proceedings of the 7th international joint conference on Autonomous agents and multiagent systems - Volume 3
Mathematics of Operations Research
IJCAI'03 Proceedings of the 18th international joint conference on Artificial intelligence
Taxed congestion games with failures
Annals of Mathematics and Artificial Intelligence
Pure nash equilibria in player-specific and weighted congestion games
WINE'06 Proceedings of the Second international conference on Internet and Network Economics
Exact price of anarchy for polynomial congestion games
STACS'06 Proceedings of the 23rd Annual conference on Theoretical Aspects of Computer Science
On the Impact of Strategy and Utility Structures on Congestion-Averse Games
WINE '09 Proceedings of the 5th International Workshop on Internet and Network Economics
The good, the bad and the cautious: safety level cooperative games
WINE'10 Proceedings of the 6th international conference on Internet and network economics
On the existence of pure strategy nash equilibria in integer-splittable weighted congestion games
SAGT'11 Proceedings of the 4th international conference on Algorithmic game theory
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Congestion games--in which players strategically choose from a set of "resources" and derive utilities that depend on the congestion on each resource--are important in a wide range of applications. However, to date, such games have been constrained to use utility functions that are linear sums with respect to resources. To remove this restriction, this paper provides a significant generalisation to the case where a player's payoff can be given by any real-valued function over the set of possible congestion vectors. Under reasonable assumptions on the structure of player strategy spaces, we constructively prove the existence of a pure strategy equilibrium for the very wide class of these generalised games in which player utility functions are congestion-averse --i.e., monotonic, submodular and independent of irrelevant alternatives. Although, as we show, these games do not admit a generalised ordinal potential function (and hence--the finite improvement property), any such game does possess a Nash equilibrium in pure strategies. A polynomial time algorithm for computing such an equilibrium is presented.