[go: up one dir, main page]
More Web Proxy on the site http://driver.im/ skip to main content
10.1145/1566374.1566418acmconferencesArticle/Chapter ViewAbstractPublication PagesecConference Proceedingsconference-collections
research-article

The price of anarchy in bertrand games

Published: 06 July 2009 Publication History

Abstract

The Internet is composed of multiple economically-independent service providers that sell bandwidth in their networks so as to maximize their own revenue. Users, on the other hand, route their traffic selfishly to maximize their own utility. How does this selfishness impact the efficiency of operation of the network? To answer this question we consider a two-stage network pricing game where service providers first select prices to charge on their links, and users pick paths to route their traffic. We give tight bounds on the price of anarchy of the game with respect to social value--the total value obtained by all the traffic routed. Unlike recent work on network pricing, in our pricing game users do not face congestion costs; instead service providers must ensure that capacity constraints on their links are satisfied. Our model extends the classic Bertrand game in economics to network settings.

References

[1]
D. Acemoglu and A. Ozdaglar. Competition and efficiency in congested markets. Mathematics of Operations Research, 32(1):1--31, 2007.
[2]
D. Acemoglu and A. Ozdaglar. Competition in parallel-serial networks. IEEE Journal on Selected Areas in Communications, special issue on Non-cooperative Behavior in Networking, 25(6):1180--1192, 2007.
[3]
E. Anshelevich, A. Dasgupta, J. Kleinberg, É. Tardos, T. Wexler, and T. Roughgarden. The price of stability for network design with fair cost allocation. In Proc. 45th IEEE Symp. Foundations of Computer Science, pages 295--304, 2004.
[4]
E. Anshelevich, A. Dasgupta, É. Tardos, and T. Wexler. Near-optimal network design with selfish agents. In Proc. ACM Symp. Theory of Computing, pages 511--520, 2003.
[5]
Mark Bagnoli and Ted Bergstrom. Log-concave probability and its applications. Economic Theory, 26(2):445--469, 08 2005.
[6]
Michael R. Baye and John Morgan. A folk theorem for one-shot bertrand games. Economics Letters, 65(1):59--65, 1999.
[7]
Shuchi Chawla and Tim Roughgarden. Bertrand competition in networks. In Symposium on Algorithmic Game Theory, pages 70--82, 2008.
[8]
R. Cole, Y. Dodis, and T. Roughgarden. Pricing network edges for heterogeneous selfish users. In Proc. 34th ACM Symp. Theory of Computing, 2003.
[9]
A. Fabrikant, A. Luthra, E. Maneva, C. Papadimitriou, and S. Shenker. On a network creation game. In Proc. ACM Symp. Principles of Distributed Computing, pages 247--251, 2003.
[10]
L. Fleischer, K. Jain, and M. Mahdian. Tolls for heterogeneous selfish users in multicommodity networks and generalized congestion games. In Proc. 45th IEEE Symp. Foundations of Computer Science, pages 277--285, 2004.
[11]
Joseph Jr. Harrington. A re-evaluation of perfect competition as the solution to the bertrand price game. Mathematical Social Sciences, 17(3):315--328, 1989.
[12]
Jason Hartline, Vahab Mirrokni, and Mukund Sundararajan. Optimal marketing strategies over social networks. In WWW '08: Proceeding of the 17th international conference on World Wide Web, pages 189--198, 2008.
[13]
A. Hayrapetyan, É. Tardos, and T. Wexler. A network pricing game for selfish traffic. In Proc. Symp. Principles of distributed Computing, pages 284--291, 2005.
[14]
A. Mas-Colell, M.D. Whinston, and J.R. Green. Microeconomic Theory. Oxford, 1995.
[15]
J. Musacchio and S. Wu. The price of anarchy in a network pricing game. In 45th Annual Allerton Conference on Communication and Control, 2007.
[16]
A. Ozdaglar and R. Srikant. Incentives and pricing in communication networks. In Algorithmic Game Theory. Cambridge Press, 2007.
[17]
T. Roughgarden. Selfish Routing and the Price of Anarchy. MIT Press, 2005.
[18]
T. Roughgarden and É. Tardos. How bad is selfish routing? Journal of the ACM, 49(2):236--259, 2002.

Cited By

View all
  • (2023)Equilibrium Analysis of Customer Attraction GamesWeb and Internet Economics10.1007/978-3-031-48974-7_14(242-255)Online publication date: 31-Dec-2023
  • (2022)Network Pricing: How to Induce Optimal Flows Under Strategic Link OperatorsOperations Research10.1287/opre.2020.206770:1(472-489)Online publication date: Jan-2022
  • (2021)Dangerous games: A literature review on cybersecurity investmentsJournal of Economic Surveys10.1111/joes.1245636:1(157-187)Online publication date: 26-Jul-2021
  • Show More Cited By

Index Terms

  1. The price of anarchy in bertrand games

    Recommendations

    Comments

    Please enable JavaScript to view thecomments powered by Disqus.

    Information & Contributors

    Information

    Published In

    cover image ACM Conferences
    EC '09: Proceedings of the 10th ACM conference on Electronic commerce
    July 2009
    376 pages
    ISBN:9781605584584
    DOI:10.1145/1566374
    • General Chair:
    • John Chuang,
    • Program Chairs:
    • Lance Fortnow,
    • Pearl Pu
    Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

    Sponsors

    Publisher

    Association for Computing Machinery

    New York, NY, United States

    Publication History

    Published: 06 July 2009

    Permissions

    Request permissions for this article.

    Check for updates

    Author Tags

    1. bandwidth pricing
    2. bertrand competition
    3. price of anarchy
    4. two-sided markets

    Qualifiers

    • Research-article

    Conference

    EC '09
    Sponsor:
    EC '09: ACM Conference on Electronic Commerce
    July 6 - 10, 2009
    California, Stanford, USA

    Acceptance Rates

    Overall Acceptance Rate 664 of 2,389 submissions, 28%

    Upcoming Conference

    EC '25
    The 25th ACM Conference on Economics and Computation
    July 7 - 11, 2025
    Stanford , CA , USA

    Contributors

    Other Metrics

    Bibliometrics & Citations

    Bibliometrics

    Article Metrics

    • Downloads (Last 12 months)8
    • Downloads (Last 6 weeks)0
    Reflects downloads up to 30 Dec 2024

    Other Metrics

    Citations

    Cited By

    View all
    • (2023)Equilibrium Analysis of Customer Attraction GamesWeb and Internet Economics10.1007/978-3-031-48974-7_14(242-255)Online publication date: 31-Dec-2023
    • (2022)Network Pricing: How to Induce Optimal Flows Under Strategic Link OperatorsOperations Research10.1287/opre.2020.206770:1(472-489)Online publication date: Jan-2022
    • (2021)Dangerous games: A literature review on cybersecurity investmentsJournal of Economic Surveys10.1111/joes.1245636:1(157-187)Online publication date: 26-Jul-2021
    • (2018)Network PricingProceedings of the 2018 ACM Conference on Economics and Computation10.1145/3219166.3219190(375-392)Online publication date: 11-Jun-2018
    • (2016)An Empirical Analysis of Algorithmic Pricing on Amazon MarketplaceProceedings of the 25th International Conference on World Wide Web10.1145/2872427.2883089(1339-1349)Online publication date: 11-Apr-2016
    • (2014)Price competition in online combinatorial marketsProceedings of the 23rd international conference on World wide web10.1145/2566486.2568016(711-722)Online publication date: 7-Apr-2014
    • (2012)Better Internet routing through intrinsic support for selfishness2012 Fourth International Conference on Communication Systems and Networks (COMSNETS 2012)10.1109/COMSNETS.2012.6151317(1-10)Online publication date: Jan-2012
    • (2011)Strategic pricing in next-hop routing with elastic demandsProceedings of the 4th international conference on Algorithmic game theory10.5555/2050805.2050838(278-289)Online publication date: 17-Oct-2011
    • (2011)De-ossifying internet routing through intrinsic support for end-network and ISP selfishnessACM SIGMETRICS Performance Evaluation Review10.1145/2007116.200716539:1(337-338)Online publication date: 7-Jun-2011
    • (2011)De-ossifying internet routing through intrinsic support for end-network and ISP selfishnessProceedings of the ACM SIGMETRICS joint international conference on Measurement and modeling of computer systems10.1145/1993744.1993798(145-146)Online publication date: 7-Jun-2011
    • Show More Cited By

    View Options

    Login options

    View options

    PDF

    View or Download as a PDF file.

    PDF

    eReader

    View online with eReader.

    eReader

    Media

    Figures

    Other

    Tables

    Share

    Share

    Share this Publication link

    Share on social media