Tolls for Heterogeneous Selfish Users in Multicommodity Networks and Generalized Congestion Games

We prove the existence of tolls to induce multicommodity, heterogeneous network users that independently choose routes minimizing their own linear function of tolls versus latency to collectively form the traffic pattern of a minimum average latency flow. This generalizes both the previous known results of the existence of tolls for multicommodity, homogeneous users [1] and for single commodity, heterogeneous users [3]. Unlike previous proofs for single commodity users in general graphs, our proof is constructive - it does not rely on a fixed point theorem - and results in a simple polynomialsized linear program to compute tolls when the number of different types of users is bounded by a polynomial. We show that our proof gives a complete characterization of flows that are enforceable by tolls. In particular, tolls exist to induce any traffic pattern that is the result of minimizing an arbitrary function from RE(G) to the reals that is nondecreasing in each of its arguments. Thus, tol...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2004
• Where: FOCS
• Authors: Lisa Fleischer, Kamal Jain, Mohammad Mahdian
• Keywords: FOCS 2004, Minimum Average Latency, Multicommodity Tolls, Theoretical Computer Science, Tolls Versus Latency