Congestion Games with Load-Dependent Failures: Identical Resources

 

 

Maria Polukarov

Technion - Israel Institute of Technology

*WEDNESDAY*  March 7, 2007
4:00 PM, 5130 Upson Hall

 

Abstract: We introduce the concept of resource failures in congestion games. We study two models - {congestion games with load-dependent failures} (CGLFs) and {taxed congestion games with failures} (TCGFs) -- that differ in the following aspects: failure probabilities may be constant or congestion-dependent; agents may have different interests and utilities - in a CGLF, a player wishes to maximize the difference between his benefit from a successful task completion and the total cost of the utilized resources, in a TCGF, the aim of a player is to minimize his expected delay. Although, as we show, CGLFs and TCGFs do not admit a potential function and therefore are not isomorphic to congestion games, we prove the existence of a pure strategy Nash equilibrium in the above classes of games.

Joint work with Michal Penn and Moshe Tennenholtz.