How to Influence Noncooperative, Selfish Agents
Lisa Fleischer
IBM T.J. Watson Research Center
Wednesday, June 1, 2005
4:30 - 5:45 PM
Terman Engineering Center, Room 453
Abstract:
The societal value of a distribution of finite resources is frequently
measured in terms of of aggregate utility. Decisions, however,
are frequently controlled by noncooperative agents who try to
maximize their own private utility.
The term "price of anarchy" refers to the ratio of social utility achieved
by selfish agents versus the social optimal.
In network routing games, the price of anarchy can be arbitrarily bad.
We review these results, and then describe some solutions to prevent
this bad outcome. These include charging users for network use; and
managing a small portion of traffic wisely. Some of these
results carry over to more general congestion games.
Operations Research Colloquia: http://or.stanford.edu/oras_seminars.html