Abstract
A Nash equilibrium of a routing network represents a stable state of the network where no user finds it beneficial to unilaterally deviate from its routing strategy. In this work, we investigate the structure of such equilibria within the context of a certain game that models selfish routing for a set of n users each shipping its traffic over a network consisting of m parallel links. In particular, we are interested in identifying the worst-case Nash equilibrium – the one that maximizes social cost. Worst-case Nash equilibria were first introduced and studied in the pioneering work of Koutsoupias and Papadimitriou [9].
More specifically, we continue the study of the Conjecture of the Fully Mixed Nash Equilibrium, henceforth abbreviated as FMNE Conjecture, which asserts that the fully mixed Nash equilibrium, when existing, is the worst-case Nash equilibrium. (In the fully mixed Nash equilibrium, the mixed strategy of each user assigns (strictly) positive probability to every link.) We report substantial progress towards identifying the validity, methodologies to establish, and limitations of, the FMNE Conjecture.
This work has been partially supported by the IST Program of the European Union under contract numbers IST-1999-14186 (ALCOM-FT) and IST-2001-33116 (FLAGS), by funds from the Joint Program of Scientific and Technological Collaboration between Greece and Cyprus, by research funds at University of Cyprus, and by the VEGA grant No. 2/3164/23.
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Lücking, T., Mavronicolas, M., Monien, B., Rode, M., Spirakis, P., Vrto, I. (2003). Which Is the Worst-Case Nash Equilibrium?. In: Rovan, B., Vojtáš, P. (eds) Mathematical Foundations of Computer Science 2003. MFCS 2003. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 2747. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-540-45138-9_49
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-540-45138-9_49
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