Subjective vs. Objective reality - The risk of running late

Abstract

We study selfish agents that have a "distorted view" of reality. We introduce a framework of subjective vs. objective reality. This is very useful to model risk averse behavior. Natural quality of service issues can be cast as special cases thereof. In particular, we study two applicable variants of the price of anarchy paradigm, the subjective price of anarchy where one compares the "optimal" subjective outcome to the outcome that arises from selfish subjective reality agents, and the objective price of anarchy where one compares the optimal objective outcome to that derived by selfish subjective agents. © 2008 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.