Resource Competition on Integral Polymatroids

Abstract

We study competitive resource allocation problems in which players distribute their demands integrally on a set of resources subject to player-specific submodular capacity constraints. Each player has to pay for each unit of demand a cost that is a nondecreasing and convex function of the total allocation of that resource. This general model of resource allocation generalizes both singleton congestion games with integer-splittable demands and matroid congestion games with player-specific costs. As our main result, we show that in such general resource allocation problems a pure Nash equilibrium is guaranteed to exist by giving a pseudo-polynomial algorithm computing a pure Nash equilibrium.