This work studies the price of anarchy and the price of stability of cost-sharing methods in weighted congestion games. We require that our cost-sharing method and our set of cost functions satisfy certain natural conditions and we present general tight price of anarchy bounds, which are robust and apply to general equilibrium concepts. We then turn to the price of stability and prove an upper ...

We investigate the impact of Stackelberg routing to reduce the price of anarchy innetwork routing games. In this setting, an α fraction of the entire demand is first routed centrallyaccording to a predefined Stackelberg strategy and the remaining demand is then routed selfishlyby (nonatomic) players. Although several advances have been made recently in proving thatStackelberg ro...

We study network games with atomic players that can split their flow. Some errors in the literature led to incorrect bounds on the price of anarchy of these games. We correct past results with a new bound for arbitrary sets of cost functions. In the case of affine cost functions, this bound implies that the price of anarchy is at most 3/2 and the cost of an equilibrium is not larger than that o...

Congestion games are a widely studied class of non-cooperative games. In fact, besides being able to model many practical settings, they constitute a framework with nice theoretical properties: Congestion games always converge to pure Nash Equilibria by means of improvement moves performed by the players, and many classes of congestion games guarantee a low price of anarchy, that is the ratio b...

We study the design of price mechanisms for communication network problems in which a user’s utility depends on the amount of flow she sends through the network, and the congestion on each link depends on the total traffic flows over it. The price mechanisms are characterized by a set of axioms that have been adopted in the cost-sharing games, and we search for the price mechanisms that provide...

We consider the problem of Internet switching, where traffic is generated by selfish users. We study a packetized (TCP-like) traffic model, which is more realistic than the widely used fluid model. We assume that routers have First-In-First-Out (FIFO) buffers of bounded capacity managed by the drop-tail policy. The utility of each user depends on its transmission rate and the congestion level. ...

We study cost-sharing games in real-time scheduling systems where the server’s activation cost every time slot is a function of its load. focus on monomial functions and consider both case when degree less than one (inducing positive congestion effect for jobs) it greater negative jobs). For former case, we provide tight bounds price anarchy, show that anarchy grows to infinity as polynomial nu...

We consider a single multi-server memoryless service station. Servers have heterogeneous service rates. Arrivals are routed to one of the servers, and the routing decisions are not based on the queue lengths. We consider two criteria for routing selection: the (Nash) equilibrium, under which each customer minimizes his own mean waiting time, given the behavior of the others; and social optimiza...