Strong price of anarchy

Nir Andelman, Michal Feldman*, Yishay Mansour

*Corresponding author for this work

Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

108 Scopus citations

Abstract

A strong equilibrium is a pure Nash equilibrium which is resilient to deviations by coalitions. We define the strong price of anarchy (SPoA) to be the ratio of the worst strong equilibrium to the social optimum. Differently from the Price of Anarchy (defined as the ratio of the worst Nash Equilibrium to the social optimum), it quantifies the loss incurred from the lack of a central designer in settings that allow for coordination. We study the SPoA in two settings, namely job scheduling and network creation. In the job scheduling game we show that for unrelated machines the SPoA can be bounded as a function of the number of machines and the size of the coalition. For the network creation game we show that the SPoA is at most 2. In both cases we show that a strong equilibrium always exists, except for a well defined subset of network creation games.

Original languageEnglish
Pages (from-to)289-317
Number of pages29
JournalGames and Economic Behavior
Volume65
Issue number2
DOIs
StatePublished - Mar 2009

Funding

FundersFunder number
International Business Machines Corporation
Lady Davis Fellowship Trust, Hebrew University of Jerusalem
United States-Israel Binational Science Foundation
Israel Science Foundation

    Keywords

    • Coalitions
    • Congestion games
    • Job scheduling
    • Network formation
    • Price of anarchy
    • Strong equilibrium
    • Strong price of anarchy

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