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Congestion Games with Failures - CGFs

Congestion Games with Failures - CGFs
Congestion Games with Failures - CGFs
We introduce a new class of games---congestion games with failures (CGFs), which extends the class of congestion games to allow for facility failures. In a basic CGF (BCGF) agents share a common set of facilities (service providers), where each service provider (SP) may fail with some known probability. For reliability reasons, an agent may choose a subset of the SPs in order to try and perform his task. The cost of an agent for utilizing any SP is a function of the total number of agents using this SP. A main feature of this setting is that the cost for an agent for successful completion of his task is the minimum of the costs of his successful attempts. We show that although BCGFs do not admit a potential function, and thus are not isomorphic to classic congestion games, they always possess a pure-strategy Nash equilibrium. We also show that the SPs' congestion experienced in different Nash equilibria is (almost) unique. For the subclass of symmetric BCGFs we give a characterization of best and worst Nash equilibria. We extend the basic model by making task submission costly and define a model for taxed CGFs (TCGFs). We prove the existence of a pure-strategy Nash equilibrium for quasi-symmetric TCGFs, and present an efficient algorithm for constructing such Nash equilibrium in symmetric TCGFs.
259-268
Penn, Michal
4b303716-075a-4f19-8889-a45120885942
Polukarov, Maria
bd2f0623-9e8a-465f-8b29-851387a64740
Tennenholtz, Moshe
59ece0e5-2a43-411c-a491-3994bd42063e
Penn, Michal
4b303716-075a-4f19-8889-a45120885942
Polukarov, Maria
bd2f0623-9e8a-465f-8b29-851387a64740
Tennenholtz, Moshe
59ece0e5-2a43-411c-a491-3994bd42063e

Penn, Michal, Polukarov, Maria and Tennenholtz, Moshe (2005) Congestion Games with Failures - CGFs. EC-05. pp. 259-268 .

Record type: Conference or Workshop Item (Paper)

Abstract

We introduce a new class of games---congestion games with failures (CGFs), which extends the class of congestion games to allow for facility failures. In a basic CGF (BCGF) agents share a common set of facilities (service providers), where each service provider (SP) may fail with some known probability. For reliability reasons, an agent may choose a subset of the SPs in order to try and perform his task. The cost of an agent for utilizing any SP is a function of the total number of agents using this SP. A main feature of this setting is that the cost for an agent for successful completion of his task is the minimum of the costs of his successful attempts. We show that although BCGFs do not admit a potential function, and thus are not isomorphic to classic congestion games, they always possess a pure-strategy Nash equilibrium. We also show that the SPs' congestion experienced in different Nash equilibria is (almost) unique. For the subclass of symmetric BCGFs we give a characterization of best and worst Nash equilibria. We extend the basic model by making task submission costly and define a model for taxed CGFs (TCGFs). We prove the existence of a pure-strategy Nash equilibrium for quasi-symmetric TCGFs, and present an efficient algorithm for constructing such Nash equilibrium in symmetric TCGFs.

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More information

Published date: June 2005
Venue - Dates: EC-05, 2005-06-01
Organisations: Agents, Interactions & Complexity

Identifiers

Local EPrints ID: 267879
URI: http://eprints.soton.ac.uk/id/eprint/267879
PURE UUID: 20f47f06-4f13-4e02-9bbc-0700dbda0730

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Date deposited: 16 Sep 2009 19:28
Last modified: 14 Mar 2024 09:01

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Contributors

Author: Michal Penn
Author: Maria Polukarov
Author: Moshe Tennenholtz

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