On the severity of Braess's paradox: designing networks for selfish users is hard
Journal of Computer and System Sciences - Special issue on FOCS 2001
Stackelberg thresholds in network routing games or the value of altruism
Proceedings of the 8th ACM conference on Electronic commerce
The effectiveness of Stackelberg strategies and tolls for network congestion games
SODA '07 Proceedings of the eighteenth annual ACM-SIAM symposium on Discrete algorithms
Designing networks with good equilibria
Proceedings of the nineteenth annual ACM-SIAM symposium on Discrete algorithms
Altruism, selfishness, and spite in traffic routing
Proceedings of the 9th ACM conference on Electronic commerce
Equilibria of atomic flow games are not unique
SODA '09 Proceedings of the twentieth Annual ACM-SIAM Symposium on Discrete Algorithms
Efficient coordination mechanisms for unrelated machine scheduling
SODA '09 Proceedings of the twentieth Annual ACM-SIAM Symposium on Discrete Algorithms
Theoretical Computer Science
Stackelberg Routing in Arbitrary Networks
WINE '08 Proceedings of the 4th International Workshop on Internet and Network Economics
Stackelberg Strategies and Collusion in Network Games with Splittable Flow
Approximation and Online Algorithms
Computing optimal randomized resource allocations for massive security games
Proceedings of The 8th International Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems - Volume 1
Efficient Methods for Selfish Network Design
ICALP '09 Proceedings of the 36th Internatilonal Collogquium on Automata, Languages and Programming: Part II
Eliciting Coordination with Rebates
Transportation Science
Selfish routing with oblivious users
SIROCCO'07 Proceedings of the 14th international conference on Structural information and communication complexity
Stackelberg strategies for atomic congestion games
ESA'07 Proceedings of the 15th annual European conference on Algorithms
Priority based load balancing in a self-interested P2P network
DBISP2P'05/06 Proceedings of the 2005/2006 international conference on Databases, information systems, and peer-to-peer computing
Stackelberg Routing in Arbitrary Networks
Mathematics of Operations Research
Stackelberg strategies for network design games
WINE'10 Proceedings of the 6th international conference on Internet and network economics
Designing Network Protocols for Good Equilibria
SIAM Journal on Computing
Selfish Traffic Allocation for Server Farms
SIAM Journal on Computing
Competition yields efficiency in load balancing games
Performance Evaluation
Game theoretical aspects in modeling and analyzing the shipping industry
ICCL'11 Proceedings of the Second international conference on Computational logistics
The price of optimum in a matching game
SAGT'11 Proceedings of the 4th international conference on Algorithmic game theory
Journal of Artificial Intelligence Research
International Journal of Applied Mathematics and Computer Science - SPECIAL SECTION: Efficient Resource Management for Grid-Enabled Applications
Design of incentive compatible mechanisms for stackelberg problems
WINE'05 Proceedings of the First international conference on Internet and Network Economics
A Stackelberg strategy for routing flow over time
Proceedings of the twenty-second annual ACM-SIAM symposium on Discrete Algorithms
Enforcing efficient equilibria in network design games via subsidies
Proceedings of the twenty-fourth annual ACM symposium on Parallelism in algorithms and architectures
Efficient methods for selfish network design
Theoretical Computer Science
The effectiveness of stackelberg strategies and tolls for network congestion games
ACM Transactions on Algorithms (TALG)
The stackelberg minimum spanning tree game
WADS'07 Proceedings of the 10th international conference on Algorithms and Data Structures
Altruism in Atomic Congestion Games
ACM Transactions on Economics and Computation
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We study the problem of optimizing the performance of a system shared by selfish, noncooperative users. We consider the concrete setting of scheduling small jobs on a set of shared machines possessing latency functions that specify the amount of time needed to complete a job, given the machine load. We measure system performance by the total latency of the system. Assigning jobs according to the selfish interests of individual users, who wish to minimize only the latency that their own jobs experience, typically results in suboptimal system performance. However, in many systems of this type there is a mixture of "selfishly controlled" and "centrally controlled" jobs. The congestion due to centrally controlled jobs will influence the actions of selfish users, and we thus aspire to contain the degradation in system performance due to selfish behavior by scheduling the centrally controlled jobs in the best possible way.We formulate this goal as an optimization problem via Stackelberg games, games in which one player acts a leader (here, the centralized authority interested in optimizing system performance) and the rest as followers (the selfish users). The problem is then to compute a strategy for the leader (a Stackelberg strategy) that induces the followers to react in a way that (approximately) minimizes the total latency in the system.In this paper, we prove that it is NP-hard to compute an optimal Stackelberg strategy and present simple strategies with provably good performance guarantees. More precisely, we give a simple algorithm that computes a strategy inducing a job assignment with total latency no more than a constant times that of the optimal assignment of all of the jobs; in the absence of centrally controlled jobs and a Stackelberg strategy, no result of this type is possible. We also prove stronger performance guarantees in the special case where every machine latency function is linear in the machine load.