Load Balancing Congestion Games and their Asymptotic Behavior
Eitan Altman (MAESTRO), Corinne Touati

TL;DR
This paper explores the equilibrium properties of load balancing congestion games where players control indivisible connections, revealing non-uniqueness and asymmetries even in symmetric networks, thus extending understanding beyond classical models.
Contribution
It introduces and analyzes new frameworks of routing games with indivisible connections, demonstrating surprising equilibrium behaviors and non-uniqueness in potential game settings.
Findings
Equilibria are non-unique even with convex link costs.
Non-symmetric equilibria can occur in symmetric networks.
New properties of load balancing congestion games are identified.
Abstract
A central question in routing games has been to establish conditions for the uniqueness of the equilibrium, either in terms of network topology or in terms of costs. This question is well understood in two classes of routing games. The first is the non-atomic routing introduced by Wardrop on 1952 in the context of road traffic in which each player (car) is infinitesimally small; a single car has a negligible impact on the congestion. Each car wishes to minimize its expected delay. Under arbitrary topology, such games are known to have a convex potential and thus a unique equilibrium. The second framework is splitable atomic games: there are finitely many players, each controlling the route of a population of individuals (let them be cars in road traffic or packets in the communication networks). In this paper, we study two other frameworks of routing games in which each of several…
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Taxonomy
TopicsGame Theory and Voting Systems · Game Theory and Applications
