1,049 research outputs found
Approximate Pure Nash Equilibria in Weighted Congestion Games: Existence, Efficient Computation, and Structure
We consider structural and algorithmic questions related to the Nash dynamics
of weighted congestion games. In weighted congestion games with linear latency
functions, the existence of (pure Nash) equilibria is guaranteed by potential
function arguments. Unfortunately, this proof of existence is inefficient and
computing equilibria is such games is a {\sf PLS}-hard problem. The situation
gets worse when superlinear latency functions come into play; in this case, the
Nash dynamics of the game may contain cycles and equilibria may not even exist.
Given these obstacles, we consider approximate equilibria as alternative
solution concepts. Do such equilibria exist? And if so, can we compute them
efficiently?
We provide positive answers to both questions for weighted congestion games
with polynomial latency functions by exploiting an "approximation" of such
games by a new class of potential games that we call -games. This allows
us to show that these games have -approximate equilibria, where is the
maximum degree of the latency functions. Our main technical contribution is an
efficient algorithm for computing O(1)-approximate equilibria when is a
constant. For games with linear latency functions, the approximation guarantee
is for arbitrarily small ; for
latency functions with maximum degree , it is . The
running time is polynomial in the number of bits in the representation of the
game and . As a byproduct of our techniques, we also show the
following structural statement for weighted congestion games with polynomial
latency functions of maximum degree : polynomially-long sequences of
best-response moves from any initial state to a -approximate
equilibrium exist and can be efficiently identified in such games as long as
is constant.Comment: 31 page
Approximate Pure Nash Equilibria in Weighted Congestion Games
We study the existence of approximate pure Nash equilibria in weighted congestion games and develop techniques to obtain approximate potential functions that prove the existence of alpha-approximate pure Nash equilibria and the convergence of alpha-improvement steps. Specifically, we show how to obtain upper bounds for approximation factor alpha for a given class of cost functions. For example for concave cost functions the factor is at most 3/2, for quadratic cost functions it is at most 4/3, and for polynomial cost functions of maximal degree d it is at at most d + 1. For games with two players we obtain tight bounds which are as small as for example 1.054 in the case of quadratic cost functions
Computing Approximate Pure Nash Equilibria in Shapley Value Weighted Congestion Games
We study the computation of approximate pure Nash equilibria in Shapley value
(SV) weighted congestion games, introduced in [19]. This class of games
considers weighted congestion games in which Shapley values are used as an
alternative (to proportional shares) for distributing the total cost of each
resource among its users. We focus on the interesting subclass of such games
with polynomial resource cost functions and present an algorithm that computes
approximate pure Nash equilibria with a polynomial number of strategy updates.
Since computing a single strategy update is hard, we apply sampling techniques
which allow us to achieve polynomial running time. The algorithm builds on the
algorithmic ideas of [7], however, to the best of our knowledge, this is the
first algorithmic result on computation of approximate equilibria using other
than proportional shares as player costs in this setting. We present a novel
relation that approximates the Shapley value of a player by her proportional
share and vice versa. As side results, we upper bound the approximate price of
anarchy of such games and significantly improve the best known factor for
computing approximate pure Nash equilibria in weighted congestion games of [7].Comment: The final publication is available at Springer via
http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-71924-5_1
Existence and Complexity of Approximate Equilibria in Weighted Congestion Games
We study the existence of approximate pure Nash equilibria (-PNE) in
weighted atomic congestion games with polynomial cost functions of maximum
degree . Previously it was known that -approximate equilibria always
exist, while nonexistence was established only for small constants, namely for
-PNE. We improve significantly upon this gap, proving that such games in
general do not have -approximate PNE, which provides
the first super-constant lower bound.
Furthermore, we provide a black-box gap-introducing method of combining such
nonexistence results with a specific circuit gadget, in order to derive
NP-completeness of the decision version of the problem. In particular,
deploying this technique we are able to show that deciding whether a weighted
congestion game has an -PNE is NP-complete. Previous
hardness results were known only for the special case of exact equilibria and
arbitrary cost functions.
The circuit gadget is of independent interest and it allows us to also prove
hardness for a variety of problems related to the complexity of PNE in
congestion games. For example, we demonstrate that the question of existence of
-PNE in which a certain set of players plays a specific strategy
profile is NP-hard for any , even for unweighted congestion
games.
Finally, we study the existence of approximate equilibria in weighted
congestion games with general (nondecreasing) costs, as a function of the
number of players . We show that -PNE always exist, matched by an almost
tight nonexistence bound of which we can again transform into
an NP-completeness proof for the decision problem
On the Impact of Singleton Strategies in Congestion Games
To what extent does the structure of the players\u27 strategy space influence the efficiency of decentralized solutions in congestion games? In this work, we investigate whether better performance is possible when restricting to load balancing games in which players can only choose among single resources. We consider three different solutions concepts, namely, approximate pure Nash equilibria, approximate one-round walks generated by selfish players aiming at minimizing their personal cost and approximate one-round walks generated by cooperative players aiming at minimizing the marginal increase in the sum of the players\u27 personal costs. The last two concepts can also be interpreted as solutions of simple greedy online algorithms for the related resource selection problem. Under fairly general latency functions on the resources, we show that, for all three types of solutions, better bounds cannot be achieved if players are either weighted or asymmetric. On the positive side, we prove that, under mild assumptions on the latency functions, improvements on the performance of approximate pure Nash equilibria are possible for load balancing games with weighted and symmetric players in the case of identical resources. We also design lower bounds on the performance of one-round walks in load balancing games with unweighted players and identical resources (in this case, solutions generated by selfish and cooperative players coincide)
The Price of Stability of Weighted Congestion Games
We give exponential lower bounds on the Price of Stability (PoS) of weighted congestion games with polynomial cost functions. In particular, for any positive integer we construct rather simple games with cost functions of degree at most which have a PoS of at least , where is the unique positive root of the equation . This almost closes the huge gap between and . Our bound extends also to network congestion games. We further show that the PoS remains exponential even for singleton games. More generally, we provide a lower bound of on the PoS of -approximate Nash equilibria for singleton games. All our lower bounds hold for mixed and correlated equilibria as well. On the positive side, we give a general upper bound on the PoS of -approximate Nash equilibria, which is sensitive to the range of the player weights and the approximation parameter . We do this by explicitly constructing a novel approximate potential function, based on Faulhaber's formula, that generalizes Rosenthal's potential in a continuous, analytic way. From the general theorem, we deduce two interesting corollaries. First, we derive the existence of an approximate pure Nash equilibrium with PoS at most ; the equilibrium's approximation parameter ranges from to in a smooth way with respect to . Second, we show that for unweighted congestion games, the PoS of -approximate Nash equilibria is at most . Read More: https://epubs.siam.org/doi/10.1137/18M120788
Social Context and Cost-Sharing in Congestion Games
Congestion games are one of the most prominent classes of games in non- cooperative game theory as they model a large collection of important applications in networks, such as selfish routing in traffic or telecommunications. For this reason, congestion games have been a driving force in recent research and my thesis lies on two major extensions of this class of games. The first extension considers congestion games embedded in a social network where players are not necessarily selfish and might care about others. We call this class social context congestion games and study how the social interactions among players affect it. In particular, we study existence of approximate pure Nash equilibria and our main result is the following. For any given set of cost functions, we provide a threshold value such that: for the class of social context congestion games with cost functions within the given set, sequences of improvement steps of players, are guaranteed to converge to an approximate pure Nash equilibrium if and only if the improvement step factor is larger than this threshold value. The second topic considers weighted congestion games under a fair cost sharing system which depends on the weight of each player, the (weighted) Shapley values. This class considers weighted congestion games where (weighted) Shapley values are used as an alternative (to proportional shares) for distributing the total cost of each resource among its users. We study the efficiency of this class of games in terms of the price of anarchy and the price of stability. Regard- ing the price of anarchy, we show general tight bounds, which apply to general equilibrium concepts. For the price of stability, we prove an upper bound for the special case of Shapley values. This bound holds for general sets of cost functions and is tight in special cases of interest, such as bounded degree polynomials. Also for bounded degree polynomials, we show that a slight deviation from the Shapley value has a huge impact on the price of stability. In fact, the price of stability becomes as bad as the price of anarchy. For this model, we also study computation of equilibria. We propose an algorithm to compute approximate pure Nash equilibria which executes a polynomial number of strategy updates. Due to the complex nature of Shapley values, computing a single strategy update is hard, however, applying sampling techniques allow us to achieve polynomial running time. We generalise the previous model allowing each player to control multiple flows. For this generalised model, we study existence and efficiency of equilibria. We exhibit a separation from the original model (each player controls only one flow) by proving that Shapley values are the only cost-sharing method that guarantees pure Nash equilibria existence in the generalised model. Also, we prove that the price of anarchy and price of stability become no larger than in the original model
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