Equilibrium Computation in Atomic Splittable Singleton Congestion Games

Abstract

We devise the first polynomial time algorithm computing a pure Nash equilibrium for atomic splittable congestion games with singleton strategies and player-specific affine cost functions. Our algorithm is purely combinatorial and computes the exact equilibrium assuming rational input. The idea is to compute a pure Nash equilibrium for an associated integrally-splittable singleton congestion game in which the players can only split their demands in integral multiples of a common packet size. While integral games have been considered in the literature before, no polynomial time algorithm computing an equilibrium was known. Also for this class, we devise the first polynomial time algorithm and use it as a building block for our main algorithm.