Tradeoffs in worst-case equilibria

  • Authors:
  • Baruch Awerbuch;Yossi Azar;Yossi Richter;Dekel Tsur

  • Affiliations:
  • Department of Computer Science, Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, MD;School of Computer Science, Tel Aviv University, Tel Aviv, Israel;School of Computer Science, Tel Aviv University, Tel Aviv, Israel;Department of Computer Science, Ben Gurion University of the Negev, Be'er Sheva, Israel

  • Venue:
  • Theoretical Computer Science - Approximation and online algorithms
  • Year:
  • 2006

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Abstract

We investigate the problem of routing traffic through a congested network in an environment of non-cooperative users. We use the worst-case coordination ratio suggested by Koutsoupias and Papadimitriou to measure the performance degradation due to the lack of a centralized traffic regulating authority. We provide a full characterization of the worst-case coordination ratio in the restricted assignment and unrelated parallel links model. In particular, we quantify the tradeoff between the "negligibility" of the traffic controlled by each user and the worst-case coordination ratio. We analyze both pure and mixed strategies systems and identify the range where their performance is similar.