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Atomic Congestion Games: Fast, Myopic and Concurrent

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Abstract

We study here the effect of concurrent greedy moves of players in atomic congestion games where n selfish agents (players) wish to select a resource each (out of m resources) so that her selfish delay there is not much. The problem of “maintaining” global progress while allowing concurrent play is exactly what is examined and answered here. We examine two orthogonal settings: (i) A game where the players decide their moves without global information, each acting “freely” by sampling resources randomly and locally deciding to migrate (if the new resource is better) via a random experiment. Here, the resources can have quite arbitrary latency that is load dependent. (ii) An “organised” setting where the players are pre-partitioned into selfish groups (coalitions) and where each coalition does an improving coalitional move. Our work considers concurrent selfish play for arbitrary latencies for the first time. Also, this is the first time where fast coalitional convergence to an approximate equilibrium is shown.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. School of Electrical and Computer Engineering, National Technical University of Athens, 157 80, Athens, Greece

    D. Fotakis

  2. Department of Computer Engineering & Informatics, University of Patras, School of Engineering, 265 00, Patras, Greece

    A. C. Kaporis

  3. Research Academic Computer Computer Technology Institute, N. Kazantzakis str., University Campus, 265 00, Rio, Patras, Greece

    P. G. Spirakis

Authors
  1. D. Fotakis
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  2. A. C. Kaporis
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  3. P. G. Spirakis
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to A. C. Kaporis.

Additional information

This work was done while the 1st author was with the Department of Infomation and Communication Systems Engineering, University of the Aegean, Greece. The 2nd author was partially supported by the IST Program of the European Union under contract number IST-015964 (AEOLUS). The 3rd author is supported by EU ICTFET under grant 215270 “Foundations of Adaptive Networked Societies of Tiny Artefacts (FRONTS)”.

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Fotakis, D., Kaporis, A.C. & Spirakis, P.G. Atomic Congestion Games: Fast, Myopic and Concurrent. Theory Comput Syst 47, 38–59 (2010). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00224-009-9198-2

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00224-009-9198-2

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