Selfishness need not be bad

Abstract

We investigate the price of anarchy (PoA) in non-atomic congestion games when the total demand $T$ gets very large. First results in this direction have recently been obtained by \cite{Colini2016On, Colini2017WINE, Colini2017arxiv} for routing games and show that the PoA converges to 1 when the growth of the total demand $T$ satisfies certain regularity conditions. We extend their results by developing a \Wuuu{new} framework for the limit analysis of \Wuuuu{the PoA that offers strong techniques such as the limit of games and applies to arbitrary growth patterns of $T$.} \Wuuu{We} show that the PoA converges to 1 in the limit game regardless of the type of growth of $T$ for a large class of cost functions that contains all polynomials and all regularly varying functions. % For routing games with BPR \Wuu{cost} functions, we show in addition that socially optimal strategy profiles converge to \Wuu{equilibria} in the limit game, and that PoA$=1+o(T^{-\beta})$, where $\beta>0$ is the degree of the \Wuu{BPR} functions. However, the precise convergence rate depends crucially on the the growth of $T$, which shows that a conjecture proposed by \cite{O2016Mechanisms} need not hold.