Competitive routing in multiuser communication networks
IEEE/ACM Transactions on Networking (TON)
Journal of the ACM (JACM)
Selfish routing with atomic players
SODA '05 Proceedings of the sixteenth annual ACM-SIAM symposium on Discrete algorithms
The effect of collusion in congestion games
Proceedings of the thirty-eighth annual ACM symposium on Theory of computing
SODA '07 Proceedings of the eighteenth annual ACM-SIAM symposium on Discrete algorithms
Atomic congestion games among coalitions
ACM Transactions on Algorithms (TALG)
Stackelberg Strategies and Collusion in Network Games with Splittable Flow
Approximation and Online Algorithms
The Impact of Oligopolistic Competition in Networks
Operations Research
STACS'99 Proceedings of the 16th annual conference on Theoretical aspects of computer science
Local smoothness and the price of anarchy in atomic splittable congestion games
Proceedings of the twenty-second annual ACM-SIAM symposium on Discrete Algorithms
The price of collusion in series-parallel networks
IPCO'10 Proceedings of the 14th international conference on Integer Programming and Combinatorial Optimization
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We investigate how collusion affects the social cost in atomic splittable routing games. Suppose that players form coalitions and each coalition behaves as if it were a single player controlling all the flows of its participants. It may be tempting to conjecture that the social cost would be lower after collusion, since there would be more coordination among the players.We construct examples to show that this conjecture is not true. These examples motivates the question: under what conditions would the social cost of the post-collusion equilibrium be bounded by the social cost of the pre-collusion equilibrium? We show that if (i) the network is "well-designed" (satisfying a natural condition), and (ii) the delay functions are affine, then collusion is always beneficial for the social cost in the Nash equilibria. On the other hand, if either of the above conditions is unsatisfied, collusion can worsen the social cost. Our main technique is a novel flow-augmenting algorithm to build Nash equilibria.