Strategic cooperation in cost sharing games

Hoefer, Martin

doi:10.1007/s00182-011-0312-8

Cited by 19 publications

(16 citation statements)

References 42 publications

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“…Research on ridesharing has focused on the coordination of itineraries and travel schedules, on effective methods of encouraging commuters to share travel expenses and reduce pollution, and on the use of new communication capabilities that have been introduced into the market in the last two decades. The need to understand cost-sharing in large unregulated settings such as the Internet or traffic networks has led to recent studies in algorithmic game theory on the design of strategic cost-sharing games to obtain Nash equilibrium properties (Chen, Roughgarden, and Valiant, 2010;Hoefer, 2013).…”

Section: Research Contextmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…A fundamental question in economics, transportation science, computer science, and management science concerns the sharing of the cost of joint investment, or the reward for joint effort, in a fair, efficient, and stable way (e.g., Hoefer, 2013;Moulin, 2002;Young, 1994). Most research on cost-sharing in economics has followed two alternative approaches.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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A network ridesharing experiment with sequential choice of transportation mode

et al. 2018

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Within the last decade, there has been a dramatic bloom in ridesharing businesses along with the emergence of new enabling technologies. A central issue in ridesharing, which is also important in the general domain of cost-sharing in economics and computer science, is that the sharing of cost implies positive externalities and hence coordination problems for the network users. We investigate these problems experimentally in the present study. In particular, we focus on how sequential observability of transportation mode choices can be a powerful facilitator of coordination in ridesharing. Our study abstracts the essential issues of coordination in ridesharing into a directed network game with experimentally testable predictions. In line with the theoretical analysis, our experimental evidence shows that even a limited extent of sequential choice observability might lead to efficient coordination. However, convergence to efficiency is slower with more limited observability, resulting in a significant increase in travel cost.

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Section: Research Contextmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

A network ridesharing experiment with sequential choice of transportation mode

et al. 2018

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“…This implies existence of separable protocols with optimal PNE and PoS 1 for a variety of classes of games, including matroid games with uniform discrete-concave costs [36], uncapacitated facility location with fixed [14] and discrete-concave costs [39], connection games (single-source [5,38] and other classes [2,3,40]) with fixed costs, and more. However, the large majority of these results are inefficient, i.e., there is no polynomial-time algorithm that computes the required optimal equilibrium.…”

Section: Proposition 1 If For a Cost Sharing Model The Non-cooperatmentioning

confidence: 99%

Efficient Black-Box Reductions for Separable Cost Sharing

et al. 2021

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In cost-sharing games with delays, a set of agents jointly uses a subset of resources. Each resource has a fixed cost that has to be shared by the players, and each agent has a nonshareable player-specific delay for each resource. A separable cost-sharing protocol determines cost shares that are budget-balanced, separable, and guarantee existence of pure Nash equilibria (PNE). We provide black-box reductions reducing the design of such a protocol to the design of an approximation algorithm for the underlying cost-minimization problem. In this way, we obtain separable cost-sharing protocols in matroid games, single-source connection games, and connection games on n-series-parallel graphs. All these reductions are efficiently computable - given an initial allocation profile, we obtain a cheaper profile and separable cost shares turning the profile into a PNE. Hence, in these domains, any approximation algorithm yields a separable cost-sharing protocol with price of stability bounded by the approximation factor.

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“…An SPoA of Θ(log n) is given in [32]. Other works that study arbitrary costsharing in network design games include those in [33][34][35][36][37][38]. Arbitrary cost sharing in the presence of convex costs was studied by Georgoulaki et al [39].…”

Section: Related Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

Equilibrium Inefficiency and Computation in Cost-Sharing Games in Real-Time Scheduling Systems

2021

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We study cost-sharing games in real-time scheduling systems where the server’s activation cost in every time slot is a function of its load. We focus on monomial cost functions and consider both the case when the degree is less than one (inducing positive congestion effect for the jobs) and when it is greater than one (inducing negative congestion effect for the jobs). For the former case, we provide tight bounds on the price of anarchy, and show that the price of anarchy grows to infinity as a polynomial of the number of jobs in the game. For the latter, we observe that existing results provide constant and tight (asymptotically in the degree of the monomial) bounds on the price of anarchy. We then turn to analyze payment mechanism with arbitrary cost-sharing, that is, when the strategy of a player includes also its payment. We show that our mechanism reduces the price of anarchy of games with n jobs and unit server costs from Θ(n) to 2. We also show that, for a restricted class of instances, a similar improvement is achieved for monomial server costs. This is not the case, however, for unrestricted instances of monomial costs, for which we prove that the price of anarchy remains super-constant for our mechanism. For systems with load-independent activation costs, we show that our mechanism can produce an optimal solution which is stable against coordinated deviations.

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Strategic cooperation in cost sharing games

Cited by 19 publications

References 42 publications

A network ridesharing experiment with sequential choice of transportation mode

A network ridesharing experiment with sequential choice of transportation mode

Efficient Black-Box Reductions for Separable Cost Sharing

Equilibrium Inefficiency and Computation in Cost-Sharing Games in Real-Time Scheduling Systems

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