Unilateral Altruism in Network Routing Games with Atomic Players

TL;DR

This paper investigates how unilateral altruism in network routing games with atomic players can significantly improve individual and overall utilities, revealing scenarios where altruism leads to unbounded benefits and inefficiencies.

Contribution

It introduces the metric Value of Unilateral Altruism (VoU) and demonstrates that in atomic player games, VoU can be arbitrarily large, unlike in non-atomic cases.

Findings

VoU can be arbitrarily large in atomic player games.

Nash equilibrium social welfare can be arbitrarily far from optimal.

Unbounded Price of Anarchy in certain altruistic routing scenarios.

Abstract

We study a routing game in which one of the players unilaterally acts altruistically by taking into consideration the latency cost of other players as well as his own. By not playing selfishly, a player can not only improve the other players' equilibrium utility but also improve his own equilibrium utility. To quantify the effect, we define a metric called the Value of Unilateral Altruism (VoU) to be the ratio of the equilibrium utility of the altruistic user to the equilibrium utility he would have received in Nash equilibrium if he were selfish. We show by example that the VoU, in a game with nonlinear latency functions and atomic players, can be arbitrarily large. Since the Nash equilibrium social welfare of this example is arbitrarily far from social optimum, this example also has a Price of Anarchy (PoA) that is unbounded. The example is driven by there being a small number of players since the same example with non-atomic players yields a Nash equilibrium that is fully efficient.