Randomized algorithms
Algorithms, games, and the internet
STOC '01 Proceedings of the thirty-third annual ACM symposium on Theory of computing
Journal of the ACM (JACM)
The Structure and Complexity of Nash Equilibria for a Selfish Routing Game
ICALP '02 Proceedings of the 29th International Colloquium on Automata, Languages and Programming
Pricing network edges for heterogeneous selfish users
Proceedings of the thirty-fifth annual ACM symposium on Theory of computing
Computing Nash equilibria for scheduling on restricted parallel links
STOC '04 Proceedings of the thirty-sixth annual ACM symposium on Theory of computing
All-norm approximation algorithms
Journal of Algorithms
Edge Pricing of Multicommodity Networks for Heterogeneous Selfish Users
FOCS '04 Proceedings of the 45th Annual IEEE Symposium on Foundations of Computer Science
Tolls for Heterogeneous Selfish Users in Multicommodity Networks and Generalized Congestion Games
FOCS '04 Proceedings of the 45th Annual IEEE Symposium on Foundations of 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
The Price of Routing Unsplittable Flow
Proceedings of the thirty-seventh 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
Convex programming for scheduling unrelated parallel machines
Proceedings of the thirty-seventh annual ACM symposium on Theory of computing
Theoretical Computer Science - Automata, languages and programming: Algorithms and complexity (ICALP-A 2004)
How much can taxes help selfish routing?
Journal of Computer and System Sciences - Special issue on network algorithms 2005
Tight bounds for worst-case equilibria
ACM Transactions on Algorithms (TALG)
Selfish Load Balancing and Atomic Congestion Games
Algorithmica
Algorithmica
The effectiveness of Stackelberg strategies and tolls for network congestion games
SODA '07 Proceedings of the eighteenth annual ACM-SIAM symposium on Discrete algorithms
A new model for selfish routing
Theoretical Computer Science
Improving the Efficiency of Load Balancing Games through Taxes
WINE '08 Proceedings of the 4th International Workshop on Internet and Network Economics
STACS'99 Proceedings of the 16th annual conference on Theoretical aspects of computer science
Cost-balancing tolls for atomic network congestion games
WINE'07 Proceedings of the 3rd international conference on Internet and network economics
On the price of anarchy and stability of correlated equilibria of linear congestion games,,
ESA'05 Proceedings of the 13th annual European conference on Algorithms
The hardness of network design for unsplittable flow with selfish users
WAOA'05 Proceedings of the Third international conference on Approximation and Online Algorithms
Tight bounds for selfish and greedy load balancing
ICALP'06 Proceedings of the 33rd international conference on Automata, Languages and Programming - Volume Part I
Routing (un-) splittable flow in games with player-specific linear latency functions
ICALP'06 Proceedings of the 33rd international conference on Automata, Languages and Programming - Volume Part I
The impact of altruism on the efficiency of atomic congestion games
TGC'10 Proceedings of the 5th international conference on Trustworthly global computing
Inner product spaces for MinSum coordination mechanisms
Proceedings of the forty-third annual ACM symposium on Theory of computing
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We study congestion games where players aim to access a set of resources. Each player has a set of possible strategies and each resource has a function associating the latency it incurs to the players using it. Players are non--cooperative and each wishes to follow a strategy that minimizes her own latency with no regard to the global optimum. Previous work has studied the impact of this selfish behavior on system performance. In this article, we study the question of how much the performance can be improved if players are forced to pay taxes for using resources. Our objective is to extend the original game so that selfish behavior does not deteriorate performance. We consider atomic congestion games with linear latency functions and present both negative and positive results. Our negative results show that optimal system performance cannot be achieved even in very simple games. On the positive side, we show that there are ways to assign taxes that can improve the performance of linear congestion games by forcing players to follow strategies where the total latency suffered is within a factor of 2 of the minimum possible; this result is shown to be tight. Furthermore, even in cases where in the absence of taxes the system behavior may be very poor, we show that the total disutility of players (latency plus taxes) is not much larger than the optimal total latency. Besides existential results, we show how to compute taxes in time polynomial in the size of the game by solving convex quadratic programs. Similar questions have been extensively studied in the model of non-atomic congestion games. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first study of the efficiency of taxes in atomic congestion games.