Study of the effect of cost policies in the convergence of selfish strategies in Pure Nash Equilibria in Congestion Games

Abstract

In this work we study of competitive situations among users of a set of global resources. More precisely we study the effect of cost policies used by these resources in the convergence time to a pure Nash equilibrium. The work is divided in two parts. In the theoretical part we prove lower and upper bounds on the convergence time for various cost policies. We then implement all the models we study and provide some experimental results. These results follows the theoretical with one exception which is the most interesting among the experiments. In the case of coalitional users the theoretical upper bound is pseudo-polynomial to the number of users but the experimental results shows that the convergence time is polynomial.