BOUNDS ON THE PRICE OF STABILITY OF UNDIRECTED NETWORK DESIGN GAMES WITH THREE PLAYERS

Abstract

After almost seven years from its definition,2 the price of stability of undirected network design games with fair cost allocation remains to be elusive. Its exact characterization has been achieved only for the basic case of two players2,7 and, as soon as the number of players increases, the gap between the known upper and lower bounds becomes super-constant, even in the special variants of multicast and broadcast games. Motivated by the intrinsic difficulties that seem to characterize this problem, we analyze the already challenging case of three players and provide either new or improved bounds. For broadcast games, we prove an upper bound of 1.485 which exactly matches a lower bound given in Ref. 4; for multicast games, we show new upper and lower bounds which confine the price of stability in the interval [1.524; 1.532]; while, for the general case, we give an improved upper bound of 1.634. The techniques exploited in this paper are a refinement of those used in Ref. 7 and can be easily adapted to deal with all the cases involving a small number of players.