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ICS
2010
Tsinghua U.

Circumventing the Price of Anarchy: Leading Dynamics to Good Behavior

14 years 1 months ago
Circumventing the Price of Anarchy: Leading Dynamics to Good Behavior
: Many natural games can have a dramatic difference between the quality of their best and worst Nash equilibria, even in pure strategies. Yet, nearly all work to date on dynamics shows only convergence to some equilibrium, especially within a polynomial number of steps. In this work we study how agents with some knowledge of the game might be able to quickly (within a polynomial number of steps) find their way to states of quality close to the best equilibrium. We consider two natural learning models in which players choose between greedy behavior and following a proposed good but untrusted strategy and analyze two important classes of games in this context, fair cost-sharing and consensus games. Both games have extremely high Price of Anarchy and yet we show that behavior in these models can efficiently reach low-cost states.
Maria-Florina Balcan, Avrim Blum, Yishay Mansour
Added 02 Mar 2010
Updated 02 Mar 2010
Type Conference
Year 2010
Where ICS
Authors Maria-Florina Balcan, Avrim Blum, Yishay Mansour
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