Abstract
We identify how to share costs locally in weighted congestion games with polynomial cost functions in order to minimize the worst-case price of anarchy (PoA). First, we prove that among all cost-sharing methods that guarantee the existence of pure Nash equilibria, the Shapley value minimizes the worst-case PoA. Second, if the guaranteed existence condition is dropped, then the proportional cost-sharing method minimizes the worst-case PoA over all cost-sharing methods. As a byproduct of our results, we obtain the first PoA analysis of the simple marginal contribution cost-sharing rule, and prove that marginal cost taxes are ineffective for improving equilibria in (atomic) congestion games.
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Gkatzelis, V., Kollias, K., Roughgarden, T. (2014). Optimal Cost-Sharing in Weighted Congestion Games. In: Liu, TY., Qi, Q., Ye, Y. (eds) Web and Internet Economics. WINE 2014. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 8877. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-13129-0_6
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-13129-0_6
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