Price of anarchy for polynomial wardrop games

Abstract

In this work, we consider Wardrop games where traffic has to be routed through a shared network. Traffic is allowed to be split into arbitrary pieces and can be modeled as network flow. For each edge in the network there is a latency function that specifies the time needed to traverse the edge given its congestion. In a Wardrop equilibrium, all used paths between a given source-destination pair have equal and minimal latency. In this paper, we allow for polynomial latency functions with an upper bound d and a lower bound s on the degree of all monomials that appear in the polynomials. For this environment, we prove upper and lower bounds on the price of anarchy. © 2006 Springer-Verlag.