Sharing the cost of muliticast transmissions (preliminary version)
STOC '00 Proceedings of the thirty-second annual ACM symposium on Theory of computing
Applications of approximation algorithms to cooperative games
STOC '01 Proceedings of the thirty-third annual ACM symposium on Theory of computing
Near-optimal network design with selfish agents
Proceedings of the thirty-fifth annual ACM symposium on Theory of computing
Hardness results for multicast cost sharing
Theoretical Computer Science
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
STACS'99 Proceedings of the 16th annual conference on Theoretical aspects of computer science
More powerful and simpler cost-sharing methods
WAOA'04 Proceedings of the Second international conference on Approximation and Online Algorithms
Free-riders in steiner tree cost-sharing games
SIROCCO'05 Proceedings of the 12th international conference on Structural Information and Communication Complexity
When ignorance helps: Graphical multicast cost sharing games
Theoretical Computer Science
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We consider the problem of sharing the cost of multicast transmissions in non-cooperative undirected networks with non-negative edge costs. In such a setting, there is a set of receivers R who want to be connected to a common source s. The set of choices available to each receiver r ∈ R is represented by the set of all (s, r)-paths in the network. Given the set of choices performed by each receiver, a public known cost sharing method determines the cost share to be charged to each of them. Receivers are selfish agents aiming to receive the transmission at the minimum cost share and their interactions create a non-cooperative game. We study the problem of designing cost sharing methods yielding games whose price of anarchy (price of stability), defined as the worst-case (best-case) ratio between the cost of a Nash equilibrium and that of an optimal solution, is not too high. None of the methods currently known in the literature is able to achieve a good behavior on the price of anarchy and very little is known about their price of stability. We first give a lower bound on the price of stability of such methods, then we define and investigate some classes of cost sharing methods in order to characterize their weak points. Finally, we propose a new method, namely the free-riders method, which if from one hand it cannot improve in general on the price of anarchy of multicast transmission games, on the other one, it admits a polynomial time algorithm for computing a pure Nash equilibrium whose cost is at most twice the optimal one.