The complexity of equilibria in cost sharing games

Abstract

We study Congestion Games with non-increasing cost functions (Cost Sharing Games) from a complexity perspective and resolve their computational hardness, which has been an open question. Specifically we prove that when the cost functions have the form f(x) = c r /x (Fair Cost Allocation) then it is PLS-complete to compute a Pure Nash Equilibrium even in the case where strategies of the players are paths on a directed network. For cost functions of the form f(x) = c r (x)/x, where c r (x) is a non-decreasing concave function we also prove PLS-completeness in undirected networks. Thus we extend the results of [7,1] to the non-increasing case. For the case of Matroid Cost Sharing Games, where tractability of Pure Nash Equilibria is known by [1] we give a greedy polynomial time algorithm that computes a Pure Nash Equilibrium with social cost at most the potential of the optimal strategy profile. Hence, for this class of games we give a polynomial time version of the Potential Method introduced in [2] for bounding the Price of Stability. © 2010 Springer-Verlag.