Revisiting collusion in routing games: A load balancing problem

Is it profitable for players to unite and merge to a single player? Obviously, the sum of utilities at an equilibrium cannot exceed the sum obtained if all players join together. But what happens if only a subset of players join together? Previous work on collusion have already shown that the societ...

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Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Altman, E., Kameda, H., Hayel, Y.
Format: Conference Proceeding
Language:English
Subjects:
Asymmetric game
Braess paradox
collusion measures
Cost function
Electronic mail
Equations
Games
load balancing
Load management
Merging
Nash equilibrium
Routing
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Summary:Is it profitable for players to unite and merge to a single player? Obviously, the sum of utilities at an equilibrium cannot exceed the sum obtained if all players join together. But what happens if only a subset of players join together? Previous work on collusion have already shown that the society may either gain or loose from collusion of a subset of players. In this paper we show for a simple load balancing example that not only the society may loose, but also the subset of players that collude may end up with a worse performance than without collusion. In doing so, we introduce new concepts that measure the price of collusion.