Bin packing of selfish items

Abstract

We study a bin packing game in which any item to be packed is handled by a selfish agent. Each agent aims at minimizing his sharing cost with the other items staying in the same bin, where the social cost is the number of bins used. We first show that computing a pure Nash equilibrium can be done in polynomial time. We then prove that the price of anarchy for the game is in between 1.6416 and 1.6575, improving the previous bounds. © 2008 Springer Berlin Heidelberg.