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Congestion Games with Failures

Congestion Games with Failures
Congestion Games with Failures
We introduce a new class of games, {\it congestion games with failures} (CGFs), which allows for resource failures in congestion games. In a CGF, players share a common set of resources (service providers), where each service provider (SP) may fail with some known probability (that may be constant or depend on the congestion on the resource). For reliability reasons, a player may choose a subset of the SPs in order to try and perform his task. The cost of a player for utilizing any SP is a function of the total number of players using this SP. A main feature of this setting is that the cost for a player for successful completion of his task is the \underline{minimum} of the costs of his successful attempts. We show that although CGFs do not, in general, admit a (generalized ordinal) potential function and the finite improvement property (and thus are not isomorphic to congestion games), they always possess a pure strategy Nash equilibrium. Moreover, every best reply dynamics converges to an equilibrium in any given CGF, and the SPs' congestion experienced in different equilibria is (almost) unique. Furthermore, we provide an efficient procedure for computing a pure strateguy equilibrium in CGFs and show that every best equilibrium (one minimizing the sum of the players' disutilities) is semi-strong. Finally, for the subclass of symmetric CGFs we give a constructive characterization of best and worst equilibria.
0166-218X
1508-1525
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 (2011) Congestion Games with Failures. Discrete Applied Mathematics, 159 (15), 1508-1525.

Record type: Article

Abstract

We introduce a new class of games, {\it congestion games with failures} (CGFs), which allows for resource failures in congestion games. In a CGF, players share a common set of resources (service providers), where each service provider (SP) may fail with some known probability (that may be constant or depend on the congestion on the resource). For reliability reasons, a player may choose a subset of the SPs in order to try and perform his task. The cost of a player for utilizing any SP is a function of the total number of players using this SP. A main feature of this setting is that the cost for a player for successful completion of his task is the \underline{minimum} of the costs of his successful attempts. We show that although CGFs do not, in general, admit a (generalized ordinal) potential function and the finite improvement property (and thus are not isomorphic to congestion games), they always possess a pure strategy Nash equilibrium. Moreover, every best reply dynamics converges to an equilibrium in any given CGF, and the SPs' congestion experienced in different equilibria is (almost) unique. Furthermore, we provide an efficient procedure for computing a pure strateguy equilibrium in CGFs and show that every best equilibrium (one minimizing the sum of the players' disutilities) is semi-strong. Finally, for the subclass of symmetric CGFs we give a constructive characterization of best and worst equilibria.

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Published date: 2011
Organisations: Agents, Interactions & Complexity

Identifiers

Local EPrints ID: 272245
URI: http://eprints.soton.ac.uk/id/eprint/272245
ISSN: 0166-218X
PURE UUID: 1b9f143c-eb40-47f4-826e-1719af55b0e1

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Date deposited: 04 May 2011 08:35
Last modified: 14 Mar 2024 09:51

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Contributors

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

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