The Complexity of Welfare Maximization in Congestion Games

• Main Authors: Meyers, Carol A. (Author), Schulz, Andreas S. (Contributor)
• Other Authors: Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Operations Research Center (Contributor), Sloan School of Management (Contributor)
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: John Wiley & Sons, Inc., 2013-03-15T18:03:35Z.
• Subjects: Article
• Online Access: Get fulltext

We investigate issues of complexity related to welfare maximization in congestion games. In particular, we provide a full classification of complexity results for the problem of finding a minimum cost solution to a congestion game, under the model of Rosenthal. We consider both network and general congestion games, and we examine several variants of the problem concerning the structure of the game and the properties of its associated cost functions. Many of these problem variants turn out to be NP-hard, and some are hard to approximate to within any finite factor, unless P = NP. We also identify several versions of the problem that are solvable in polynomial time.
United States. Dept. of Energy (Grant Number: DE-AC52-07NA27344)
Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (Grant Number: LLNL-JRNL-410585)
United States. Office of Naval Research (Grant Number: N000141110056)