On the Price of Anarchy for Flows over Time

Dynamic network flows, or network flows over time, constitute an important model for real-world situations in which steady states are unusual, such as urban traffic and the internet. These applications immediately raise the issue of analyzing dynamic network flows from a game-theoretic perspective. In this paper, we study dynamic equilibria in the deterministic fluid queuing model in single-source, single-sink networks—arguably the most basic model for flows over time. In the last decade, we have witnessed significant developments in the theoretical understanding of the model. However, several fundamental questions remain open. One of the most prominent ones concerns the price of anarchy, measured as the worst-case ratio between the minimum time required to route a given amount of flow from the source to the sink and the time a dynamic equilibrium takes to perform the same task. Our main result states that, if we could reduce the inflow of the network in a dynamic equilibrium, then the price of anarchy is bounded by a factor, parameterized by the longest path length that converges to [Formula: see text], and this is tight. This significantly extends a result by Bhaskar et al. (SODA 2011). Furthermore, our methods allow us to determine that the price of anarchy in parallel-link and parallel-path networks is exactly 4/3. Finally, we argue that, if a certain, very natural, monotonicity conjecture holds, the price of anarchy in the general case is exactly [Formula: see text].

Bounding the Inefficiency of Compromise in Opinion Formation

Social networks on the Internet have seen an enormous growth recently and play a crucial role in different aspects of today’s life. They have facilitated information dissemination in ways that have been beneficial for their users but they are often used strategically in order to spread information that only serves the objectives of particular users. These properties have inspired a revision of classical opinion formation models from sociology using game-theoretic notions and tools. We follow the same modeling approach, focusing on scenarios where the opinion expressed by each user is a compromise between her internal belief and the opinions of a small number of neighbors among her social acquaintances. We formulate simple games that capture this behavior and quantify the inefficiency of equilibria using the well-known notion of the price of anarchy. Our results indicate that compromise comes at a cost that strongly depends on the neighborhood size.

The Pareto Frontier of Inefficiency in Mechanism Design

We study the trade-off between the price of anarchy (PoA) and the price of stability (PoS) in mechanism design in the prototypical problem of unrelated machine scheduling. We give bounds on the space of feasible mechanisms with respect to these metrics and observe that two fundamental mechanisms, namely the first price (FP) and the second price (SP), lie on the two opposite extrema of this boundary. Furthermore, for the natural class of anonymous task-independent mechanisms, we completely characterize the PoA/PoS Pareto frontier; we design a class of optimal mechanisms [Formula: see text] that lie exactly on this frontier. In particular, these mechanisms range smoothly with respect to parameter [Formula: see text] across the frontier, between the first price ([Formula: see text]) and second price ([Formula: see text]) mechanisms. En route to these results, we also provide a definitive answer to an important question related to the scheduling problem, namely whether nontruthful mechanisms can provide better makespan guarantees in the equilibrium compared with truthful ones. We answer this question in the negative by proving that the price of anarchy of all scheduling mechanisms is at least n, where n is the number of machines.

The Buck-Passing Game

We consider two classes of games in which players are the vertices of a directed graph. Initially, nature chooses one player according to some fixed distribution and gives the player a buck. This player passes the buck to one of the player’s out-neighbors in the graph. The procedure is repeated indefinitely. In one class of games, each player wants to minimize the asymptotic expected frequency of times that the player receives the buck. In the other class of games, the player wants to maximize it. The PageRank game is a particular case of these maximizing games. We consider deterministic and stochastic versions of the game, depending on how players select the neighbor to which to pass the buck. In both cases, we prove the existence of pure equilibria that do not depend on the initial distribution; this is achieved by showing the existence of a generalized ordinal potential. If the graph on which the game is played admits a Hamiltonian cycle, then this is the outcome of prior-free Nash equilibrium in the minimizing game. For the minimizing game, we then use the price of anarchy and stability to measure fairness of these equilibria.

Machine load balancing game with linear externalities

The Machine Load Balancing Game with linear externalities is considered. A set of jobs is to be assigned to a set of machines with different latencies depending on their own loads and also loads on other machines. Jobs choose machines to minimize their own latencies. The social cost of a schedule is the maximum delay among all machines, i.e. {\it makespan. For the case of two machines in this model an Nash equilibrium existence is proven and of the expression for the Price of Anarchy is obtained.

Optimal Taxes in Atomic Congestion Games

How can we design mechanisms to promote efficient use of shared resources? Here, we answer this question in relation to the well-studied class of atomic congestion games, used to model a variety of problems, including traffic routing. Within this context, a methodology for designing tolling mechanisms that minimize the system inefficiency (price of anarchy) exploiting solely local information is so far missing in spite of the scientific interest. In this article, we resolve this problem through a tractable linear programming formulation that applies to and beyond polynomial congestion games. When specializing our approach to the polynomial case, we obtain tight values for the optimal price of anarchy and corresponding tolls, uncovering an unexpected link with load balancing games. We also derive optimal tolling mechanisms that are constant with the congestion level, generalizing the results of Caragiannis et al. [8] to polynomial congestion games and beyond. Finally, we apply our techniques to compute the efficiency of the marginal cost mechanism. Surprisingly, optimal tolling mechanism using only local information perform closely to existing mechanism that utilize global information, e.g., Bilò and Vinci [6], while the marginal cost mechanism, known to be optimal in the continuous-flow model, has lower efficiency than that encountered levying no toll. All results are tight for pure Nash equilibria and extend to coarse correlated equilibria.

Additively Separable Hedonic Games with Social Context

In hedonic games, coalitions are created as a result of the strategic interaction of independent players. In particular, in additively separable hedonic games, every player has valuations for all other ones, and the utility for belonging to a coalition is given by the sum of the valuations for all other players belonging to it. So far, non-cooperative hedonic games have been considered in the literature only with respect to totally selfish players. Starting from the fundamental class of additively separable hedonic games, we define and study a new model in which, given a social graph, players also care about the happiness of their friends: we call this class of games social context additively separable hedonic games (SCASHGs). We focus on the fundamental stability notion of Nash equilibrium, and study the existence, convergence and performance of stable outcomes (with respect to the classical notions of price of anarchy and price of stability) in SCASHGs. In particular, we show that SCASHGs are potential games, and therefore Nash equilibria always exist and can be reached after a sequence of Nash moves of the players. Finally, we provide tight or asymptotically tight bounds on the price of anarchy and the price of stability of SCASHGs.