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Altruism, selfishness, and spite in traffic routing

Published: 08 July 2008 Publication History

Abstract

In this paper, we study the price of anarchy of traffic routing, under the assumption that users are partially altruistic or spiteful. We model such behavior by positing that the "cost" perceived by a user is a linear combination of the actual latency of the route chosen (selfish component), and the increase in latency the user causes for others (altruistic component). We show that if all users have a coefficient of at least β > 0 for the altruistic component, then the price of anarchy is bounded by 1/β, for all network topologies, arbitrary commodities, and arbitrary semi-convex latency functions. We extend this result to give more precise bounds on the price of anarchy for specific classes of latency functions, even for β < 0 modeling spiteful behavior. In particular, we show that if all latency functions are linear, the price of anarchy is bounded by 4/(3+2β--β2).
We next study non-uniform altruism distributions, where different users may have different coefficients β. We prove that all such games, even with infinitely many types of players, have a Nash Equilibrium. We show that if the average of the coefficients for the altruistic components of all users is β, then the price of anarchy is bounded by 1/β, for single commodity parallel link networks, and arbitrary convex latency functions. In particular, this result generalizes, albeit non-constructively, the Stackelberg routing results of Roughgarden and of Swamy. More generally, we bound the price of anarchy based on the class of allowable latency functions, and as a corollary obtain tighter bounds for Stackelberg routing than a recent result of Swamy.

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cover image ACM Conferences
EC '08: Proceedings of the 9th ACM conference on Electronic commerce
July 2008
332 pages
ISBN:9781605581699
DOI:10.1145/1386790
Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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Published: 08 July 2008

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Author Tags

  1. altruism
  2. anarchy
  3. routing
  4. selfishness
  5. spite

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EC '08
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EC '08: ACM Conference on Electronic Commerce
July 8 - 12, 2008
Il, Chicago, USA

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  • (2024)Participatory Objective Design via Preference ElicitationProceedings of the 2024 ACM Conference on Fairness, Accountability, and Transparency10.1145/3630106.3658994(1637-1662)Online publication date: 3-Jun-2024
  • (2024)Contacts, altruism and competing externalitiesEuropean Economic Review10.1016/j.euroecorev.2024.104794167(104794)Online publication date: Aug-2024
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