ON THE INEFFICIENCY OF EQUILIBRIA IN CONGESTION GAMES — DRAFT PLEASE DO NOT DISTRIBUTE —.pdfVIP

ON THE INEFFICIENCY OF EQUILIBRIA IN CONGESTION GAMES — DRAFT; PLEASE DO NOT DISTRIBUTE — ∗ ∗∗ ∗∗∗ ´ ´ JOSE R. CORREA , ANDREAS S. SCHULZ , AND NICOLAS E. STIER-MOSES ∗ School of Business, Universidad Adolfo Ib´a˜nez Av. Presidente Err´azuriz 3485, Las Condes, Santiago, Chile; correa@uai.cl ∗∗ Sloan School of Management and Operations Research Center, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Office E53-361, 77 Massachusetts Avenue, Cambridge, MA 02139-4307, USA; schulz@ ∗∗∗ Decision, Risk, and Operations Division, Columbia Business School, Uris Hall, Room 418, 3022 Broadway New York, NY 10027-6902; nicolas.stier@ Abstract. We present a short geometric proof of the price of anarchy and price of stability results that have recently been established in a series of papers on selfish routing. This novel proof also facilitates two types of new results: On the one hand, we give pseudo- approximation results that depend on the class of allowable cost functions. On the other hand, we offer improved bounds on the inefficiency of Nash equilibria for situations in which the equilibrium travel times are within reasonable limits of the free-flow travel times, a scenario that captures empirical observations in vehicular traffic networks. Our results actually hold in the more general context of congestion games, which provide the framework in which we describe this work. 1. Introduction In nonatomic congestion games we are given a finite set A of resources, and k types 1, 2,... ,k of players. Each player type i posses