Equilibrium Computation in Atomic Splittable Routing Games

We present polynomial-time algorithms as well as hardness results for equilibrium computation in atomic splittable routing games, for the case of general convex cost functions. These games model traffic in freight transportation, market oligopolies, data networks, and various other applications. An atomic splittable routing game is played on a network where the edges have traffic-dependent cost functions, and player strategies correspond to flows in the network. A player can thus split its traffic arbitrarily among different paths. While many properties of equilibria in these games have been studied, efficient algorithms for equilibrium computation are known for only two cases: if cost functions are affine, or if players are symmetric. Neither of these conditions is met in most practical applications. We present two algorithms for routing games with general convex cost functions on parallel links. The first algorithm is exponential in the number of players, while the second is exponential in the number of edges; thus if either of these is small, we get a polynomial-time algorithm. These are the first algorithms for these games with convex cost functions. Lastly, we show that in general networks, given input C, it is NP-hard to decide if there exists an equilibrium where every player has cost at most C

Equilibrium Computation in Resource Allocation Games

We study the equilibrium computation problem for two classical resource allocation games: atomic splittable congestion games and multimarket Cournot oligopolies. For atomic splittable congestion games with singleton strategies and player-specific affine cost functions, we devise the first polynomial time algorithm computing a pure Nash equilibrium. Our algorithm is combinatorial and computes the exact equilibrium assuming rational input. The idea is to compute an equilibrium for an associated integrally-splittable singleton congestion game in which the players can only split their demands in integral multiples of a common packet size. While integral games have been considered in the literature before, no polynomial time algorithm computing an equilibrium was known. Also for this class, we devise the first polynomial time algorithm and use it as a building block for our main algorithm. We then develop a polynomial time computable transformation mapping a multimarket Cournot competition game with firm-specific affine price functions and quadratic costs to an associated atomic splittable congestion game as described above. The transformation preserves equilibria in either games and, thus, leads -- via our first algorithm -- to a polynomial time algorithm computing Cournot equilibria. Finally, our analysis for integrally-splittable games implies new bounds on the difference between real and integral Cournot equilibria. The bounds can be seen as a generalization of the recent bounds for single market oligopolies obtained by Todd [2016].Comment: This version contains some typo corrections onl