Graphical congestion games

Abstract

We consider congestion games with linear latency functions in which each player is aware only of a subset of all the other players. This is modeled by means of a social knowledge graph G in which nodes represent players and there is an edge from i to j if i knows j. Under the assumption that the payoff of each player is affected only by the strategies of the adjacent ones, we first give a complete characterization of the games possessing pure Nash equilibria. We then investigate the impact of the limited knowledge of the players on the performance of the game. More precisely, given a bound on the maximum degree of G, for the convergent cases we provide tight lower and upper bounds on the price of stability and asymptotically tight bounds on the price of anarchy. All the results are then extended to load balancing games. © 2008 Springer Berlin Heidelberg.