We study a setting of non-atomic routing in a network of m parallel links with asymmetry of information. While a central entity (such as a GPS navigation system) — a mediator hereafter — knows the cost functions associated with the links, they are unknown to the individual agents controlling the flow. The mediator gives incentive compatible recommendations to agents, trying to minimize the tota...

Elisée Reclus (1830-1905) argued that ‘anarchy is the highest expression of order’. This assertion, clashing with the bourgeois interpretation of anarchy as chaos, perfectly captured the theories that were being elaborated by Reclus and other anarchist geographers including Pëtr Kropotkin (1842-1921). At the centre of these theories lay the conviction that societies organised around mutual aid ...

We consider network contribution games, where each agent in a social network has a budget of effort that he can contribute to different collaborative projects or relationships. Depending on the contribution of the involved agents a relationship will flourish or drown, and to measure the success we use a reward function for each relationship. Every agent is trying to maximize the reward from all...

We consider the problem of designing truthful mechanisms for scheduling selfish tasks (or agents)—whose objective is the minimization of their completion times—on parallel identical machines in order to minimize the makespan. A truthful mechanism can be easily obtained in this context (if we, of course, assume that the tasks cannot shrink their lengths) by scheduling the tasks following the inc...

We focus on a class of nonconvex cooperative optimization problems that involve multiple participants. We study the duality framework and provide geometric and analytic characterizations of the duality gap. The dual problem is related to a market setting in which each participant pursues self-interests at a given price of common goods. The duality gap is a form of price of anarchy. We prove tha...

This paper studies the performance of Mobile Ad hoc Networks (MANETs) when the nodes, that form a Poisson point process, selfishly choose their Medium Access Probability (MAP). We consider goodput and delay as the performance metric that each node is interested in optimizing taking into account the transmission energy costs. We introduce a pricing scheme based on the transmission energy require...

In the model of restricted parallel links, n users must be routed on m parallel links under the restriction that the link for each user be chosen from a certain set of allowed links for the user. In a (pure) Nash equilibrium, no user may improve its own Individual Cost (latency) by unilaterally switching to another link from its set of allowed links. The Price of Anarchy is a widely adopted mea...

In a system where noncooperative agents share a common resource, we propose the price of anarchy, which is the ratio between the worst possible Nash equilibrium and the social optimum, as a measure of the effectiveness of the system. Deriving upper and lower bounds for this ratio in a model where several agents share a very simple network leads to some interesting mathematics, results, and open...

In this survey we present some recent advances in the literature of atomic (mainly network) congestion games. The algorithmic questions that we are interested in have to do with the existence of pure Nash equilibria, the efficiency of their construction when they exist, as well as the gap of the best/worst (mixed in general) Nash equilibria from the social optima in such games, typically called...