Bounding the Inefficiency of Altruism through Social Contribution Games

Rahn, Mona; Schäfer, Guido

doi:10.1007/978-3-642-45046-4_32

Cited by 23 publications

(24 citation statements)

References 29 publications

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“…Their work provides bounds on the price of anarchy under these models, for linear congestion games (among other classes of games). Moreover, Rahn and Schäfer [2013] introduce so-called social contribution games, where each player's individual cost is equal to the cost he induces on society because of his presence. They show that such games constitute useful abstractions of altruistic games when it comes to the analysis of the robust price of anarchy.…”

Section: Subsequent Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

Altruism and Its Impact on the Price of Anarchy

Chen

Keijzer

Kempe

et al. 2014

ACM Trans. Econ. Comput.

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We study the inefficiency of equilibria for congestion games when players are (partially) altruistic. We model altruistic behavior by assuming that player i's perceived cost is a convex combination of 1 − α i times his direct cost and α i times the social cost. Tuning the parameters α i allows smooth interpolation between purely selfish and purely altruistic behavior. Within this framework, we study primarily altruistic extensions of (atomic and nonatomic) congestion games, but also obtain some results on fair cost-sharing games and valid utility games.We derive (tight) bounds on the price of anarchy of these games for several solution concepts. Thereto, we suitably adapt the smoothness notion introduced by Roughgarden and show that it captures the essential properties to determine the robust price of anarchy of these games. Our bounds show that for atomic congestion games and cost-sharing games, the robust price of anarchy gets worse with increasing altruism, while for valid utility games, it remains constant and is not affected by altruism.However, the increase in the price of anarchy is not a universal phenomenon: For general nonatomic congestion games with uniform altruism, the price of anarchy improves with increasing altruism. For atomic and nonatomic symmetric singleton congestion games, we derive bounds on the pure price of anarchy that improve as the average level of altruism increases. (For atomic games, we only derive such bounds when cost functions are linear.) Since the bounds are also strictly lower than the robust price of anarchy, these games exhibit natural examples in which pure Nash equilibria are more efficient than more permissive notions of equilibrium.

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Section: Subsequent Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

Altruism and Its Impact on the Price of Anarchy

Chen

Keijzer

Kempe

et al. 2014

ACM Trans. Econ. Comput.

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“…This result was also found by Rivera Letelier [61] and Rahn and Schäfer [60]. Here we give a short and simple proof that we discussed in private communication with J.R. Correa.…”

Section: Special Cases 31supporting

confidence: 82%

“…For that model this is significantly better than the price of anarchy for the WSPT rule, which is equal to 4. Rahn and Schäfer [60] find the same coordination mechanism in relation to α-altruistic extensions of scheduling games. These are extensions where the perceived utility of players is partly influenced by the total social costs.…”

Section: Selfish Jobs On Related Machinesmentioning

confidence: 70%

“…Most notably, following the work by Koutsoupias and Papadimitriou [45], which introduced the price of anarchy measure, a lot of work was done on the, egalitarian 1 , makespan objective, C max (= max j C j ), as social choice function [4,11,18,42,45,70]. Like this chapter, recent publications focus more on utilitarian social choice functions [6,12,15,60].…”

Section: Scheduling Selfish Jobs On Related Machinesmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Mechanisms for scheduling games with selfish players

Hoeksma

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“…After publication of a preliminary conference version of the present paper [1], follow-up work by Rahn and Schäfer appeared as [30]. In their paper, the authors relate the study of altruistic extensions of games to a class of games, named social contribution games, and improve some of the upper bounds we give here.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Inefficiency of Games with Social Context

Anagnostopoulos

Becchetti

Keijzer

et al. 2013

Algorithmic Game Theory

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The study of other-regarding player behavior such as altruism and spite in games has recently received quite some attention in the algorithmic game theory literature. Already for very simple models, it has been shown that altruistic behavior can actually be harmful for society in the sense that the price of anarchy may increase as the players become more altruistic. In this paper, we study the severity of this phenomenon for more realistic settings in which there is a complex underlying social structure, causing the players to direct their altruistic and spiteful behavior in a refined player-specific sense (depending, for example, on friendships that exist among the players). Our findings show that the increase in the price of anarchy is modest for congestion games and minsum scheduling games, whereas it might be drastic for generalized second price auctions.

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Bounding the Inefficiency of Altruism through Social Contribution Games

Cited by 23 publications

References 29 publications

Altruism and Its Impact on the Price of Anarchy

Altruism and Its Impact on the Price of Anarchy

Mechanisms for scheduling games with selfish players

Inefficiency of Games with Social Context

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