Selfish routing and network creation games

Abstract

This work studies the two important problems of routing and network creation in the situation of selfish behavior of agents. In routing, agents want to send their data from source to destination. They try to reduce cost incurred in the process of routing. In network creation, agents create agent-to-agent link to form a network on which they can Communicate. Here there are two types of cost incurred: link creation cost and routing cost. Each agent tries to reduce his own cost. To study degradation caused by selfish behavior of agents we primarily use the standard notation of Price of Anarchy, which is ratio of the cost incurred at Nash equilibrium to the optimal cost. We show some results on Price of Anarchy and on different cost functions for above two problems, we propose a new model in network creation and show a polynomial time algorithm to verify Nash equilibrium.