Congestion Games with Mixed Objectives

TL;DR

This paper introduces congestion games with mixed objectives, analyzing their equilibrium existence, convergence, and approximation bounds, to better model network scenarios balancing latency and bandwidth.

Contribution

It generalizes congestion games to include mixed objectives, providing new insights into equilibrium existence, convergence, and approximation in such settings.

Findings

Pure Nash equilibria exist under certain conditions.

Improvement dynamics converge in specific cases.

Approximation ratios are bounded for games without PNE.

Abstract

We study a new class of games which generalizes congestion games and its bottleneck variant. We introduce congestion games with mixed objectives to model network scenarios in which players seek to optimize for latency and bandwidths alike. We characterize the existence of pure Nash equilibria (PNE) and the convergence of improvement dynamics. For games that do not possess PNE we give bounds on the approximation ratio of approximate pure Nash equilibria.