Concurrent imitation dynamics in congestion games

Imitating successful behavior is a natural and frequently applied approach to trust in when facing scenarios for which we have little or no experience upon which we can base our decision. In this paper, we consider such behavior in atomic congestion games. We propose to study concurrent imitation dynamics that emerge when each player samples another player and possibly imitates this agents' strategy if the anticipated latency gain is sufficiently large. Our main focus is on convergence properties. Using a potential function argument, we show that our dynamics converge in a monotonic fashion to stable states. In such a state none of the players can improve its latency by imitating somebody else. As our main result, we show rapid convergence to approximate equilibria. At an approximate equilibrium only a small fraction of agents sustains a latency significantly above or below average. In particular, imitation dynamics behave like fully polynomial time approximation schemes (FPTAS)....

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2009
• Where: PODC
• Authors: Heiner Ackermann, Petra Berenbrink, Simon Fischer, Martin Hoefer
• Keywords: Concurrent Imitation Dynamics, Linear Latency Function, Parallel Computing, PODC 2009, Singleton Congestion Games