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2011

Stackelberg Strategies and Collusion in Network Games with Splittable Flow

12 years 10 months ago
Stackelberg Strategies and Collusion in Network Games with Splittable Flow
We study the impact of collusion in network games with splittable flow and focus on the well established price of anarchy as a measure of this impact. We first investigate symmetric load balancing games and show that the price of anarchy is at most m, where m denotes the number of coalitions. For general networks, we present an instance showing that the price of anarchy is unbounded, even in the case of two coalitions. If latencies are restricted to polynomials with nonnegative coefficients and bounded degree, we prove upper bounds on the price of anarchy for general networks, which improve upon the current best ones except for affine latencies. In light of the negative results even for two coalitions, we analyze the effectiveness of Stackelberg strategies as a means to improve the quality of Nash equilibria. In this setting, an α fraction of the entire demand is first routed centrally by a Stackelberg leader according to a predefined Stackelberg strategy and the remaining deman...
Tobias Harks
Added 14 May 2011
Updated 14 May 2011
Type Journal
Year 2011
Where MST
Authors Tobias Harks
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