Statics and Dynamics of Selfish Interactions in Distributed Service Systems

Fabrizio Altarelli, Alfredo Braunstein and Luca Dall’Asta

PLOS ONE, 2015, vol. 10, issue 7, 1-29

Abstract: We study a class of games which models the competition among agents to access some service provided by distributed service units and which exhibits congestion and frustration phenomena when service units have limited capacity. We propose a technique, based on the cavity method of statistical physics, to characterize the full spectrum of Nash equilibria of the game. The analysis reveals a large variety of equilibria, with very different statistical properties. Natural selfish dynamics, such as best-response, usually tend to large-utility equilibria, even though those of smaller utility are exponentially more numerous. Interestingly, the latter actually can be reached by selecting the initial conditions of the best-response dynamics close to the saturation limit of the service unit capacities. We also study a more realistic stochastic variant of the game by means of a simple and effective approximation of the average over the random parameters, showing that the properties of the average-case Nash equilibria are qualitatively similar to the deterministic ones.

Date: 2015
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0119286 (text/html)
https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article/file?id= ... 19286&type=printable (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:plo:pone00:0119286

DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0119286

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in PLOS ONE from Public Library of Science
Bibliographic data for series maintained by plosone ().