Sciweavers

CORR
2008
Springer

Altruism in Congestion Games

13 years 3 months ago
Altruism in Congestion Games
This paper studies the effects of introducing altruistic agents into atomic congestion games. Altruistic behavior is modeled by a trade-off between selfish and social objectives. In particular, we assume agents optimize a linear combination of personal delay of a strategy and the resulting increase in social cost. Our model can be embedded in the framework of congestion games with player-specific latency functions. Stable states are the Nash equilibria of these games, and we examine their existence and the convergence of sequential best-response dynamics. Previous work shows that for symmetric singleton games with convex delays Nash equilibria are guaranteed to exist. For concave delay functions we observe that there are games without Nash equilibria and provide a polynomial time algorithm to decide existence for symmetric singleton games with arbitrary delay functions. Our algorithm can be extended to compute best and worst Nash equilibria if they exist. For more general congestion g...
Martin Hoefer, Alexander Skopalik
Added 09 Dec 2010
Updated 09 Dec 2010
Type Journal
Year 2008
Where CORR
Authors Martin Hoefer, Alexander Skopalik
Comments (0)