{"id":547155,"date":"2018-11-01T01:31:29","date_gmt":"2018-11-01T08:31:29","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/cm-edgetun.pages.dev\/en-us\/research\/?post_type=msr-research-item&p=547155"},"modified":"2018-11-01T01:31:29","modified_gmt":"2018-11-01T08:31:29","slug":"incentives-and-coordination-in-bottleneck-models","status":"publish","type":"msr-research-item","link":"https:\/\/cm-edgetun.pages.dev\/en-us\/research\/publication\/incentives-and-coordination-in-bottleneck-models\/","title":{"rendered":"Incentives and Coordination in Bottleneck Models"},"content":{"rendered":"
We study a variant of Vickrey’s classic bottleneck model. In our model there are $n$ agents and each agent strategically chooses when to join a first-come-first-served observable queue. Agents dislike standing in line and they take actions in discrete time steps: we assume that each agent has a cost of $1$ for every time step he waits before joining the queue and a cost of $w>1$ for every time step he waits in the queue. At each time step a single agent can be processed. Before each time step, every agent observes the queue and strategically decides whether or not to join, with the goal of minimizing his expected cost.<\/p>\n

In this paper we focus on symmetric strategies which are arguably more natural as they require less coordination. This brings up the following twist to the usual price of anarchy question: what is the main source for the inefficiency of symmetric equilibria? is it the players’ strategic behavior or the lack of coordination?<\/span><\/div>\n

We present results for two different parameter regimes that are qualitatively very different: (i) when $w$ is fixed and $n$ grows, we prove a tight bound of $2$ and show that the entire loss is due to the players’ selfish behavior (ii) when $n$ is fixed and $w$ grows, we prove a tight bound of $\\Theta \\left(\\sqrt{\\frac{w}{n}}\\right)$ and show that it is mainly due to lack of coordination: the same order of magnitude of loss is suffered by any symmetric profile.
\n<\/span><\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

We study a variant of Vickrey’s classic bottleneck model. In our model there are $n$ agents and each agent strategically chooses when to join a first-come-first-served observable queue. Agents dislike standing in line and they take actions in discrete time steps: we assume that each agent has a cost of $1$ for every time step […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"featured_media":0,"template":"","meta":{"msr-url-field":"","msr-podcast-episode":"","msrModifiedDate":"","msrModifiedDateEnabled":false,"ep_exclude_from_search":false,"_classifai_error":"","msr-author-ordering":null,"msr_publishername":"","msr_publisher_other":"","msr_booktitle":"","msr_chapter":"","msr_edition":"","msr_editors":"","msr_how_published":"","msr_isbn":"","msr_issue":"","msr_journal":"","msr_number":"","msr_organization":"","msr_pages_string":"","msr_page_range_start":"","msr_page_range_end":"","msr_series":"","msr_volume":"","msr_copyright":"","msr_conference_name":"The 14th Conference on Web and Internet Economics (WINE 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