The price of anarchy in cooperative network creation games

Abstract

A fundamental family of problems at the intersection between computer science and operations research is network design . This area of research has become increasingly important given the continued growth of computer networks such as the Internet. Traditionally, we want to find a minimum-cost (sub)network that satisfies some specified property such as k -connectivity or connectivity on terminals (as in the classic Steiner tree problem). This goal captures the (possibly incremental) creation cost of the network, but does not incorporate the cost of actually using the network. In contrast, network routing has the goal of optimizing the usage cost of the network, but assumes that the network has already been created.