Tight bounds for cost-sharing in weighted congestion games

Abstract

This work studies the price of anarchy and the price of stability of cost-sharing methods in weighted congestion games. We require that our cost-sharing method and our set of cost functions satisfy certain natural conditions and we present general tight price of anarchy bounds, which are robust and apply to general equilibrium concepts. We then turn to the price of stability and prove an upper bound for the Shapley value cost-sharing method, which holds for general sets of cost functions and which is tight in special cases of interest, such as bounded degree polynomials. Also for bounded degree polynomials, we close the paper with a somehow surprising result, showing that a slight deviation from the Shapley value has a huge impact on the price of stability. In fact, for this case, the price of stability becomes as bad as the price of anarchy.