Coordination Mechanisms

Abstract. We introduce the notion of coordination mechanisms to improve the performance in systems with independent selfish and noncolluding agents. The quality of a coordination mechanism is measured by its price of anarchy—the worst-case performance of a Nash equilibrium over the (centrally controlled) social optimum. We give upper and lower bounds for the price of anarchy for selfish task allocation and congestion games.

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2004
• Where: ICALP
• Authors: George Christodoulou, Elias Koutsoupias, Akash Nanavati
• Keywords: Coordination Mechanism, ICALP 2004, Selfish Task Allocation, Theoretical Computer Science, Worst-case Performance