On best response dynamics in weighted congestion games with polynomial delays

Abstract

We investigate the speed of convergence of best response dynamics to approximately optimal solutions in weighted congestion games with polynomial delay functions. Awerbuch et al. (Fast convergence to nearly optimal solutions in potential games. ACM Conference on Electronic Commerce, 2008) showed that the convergence time of such dynamics to Nash equilibrium may be exponential in the number of players n even for unweighted players and linear delay functions. Nevertheless, we show that Θ(n log log W) (where W is the sum of all the players’ weights) best responses are necessary and sufficient to achieve states that approximate the optimal solution by a constant factor, under the assumption that every O(n) steps each player performs a constant (and non-null) number of best responses. For congestion games in which computing a best response is a polynomial time solvable problem, such a dynamics naturally implies a polynomial time distributed algorithm for the problem of computing the social optimum in congestion games, approximating the optimal solution by a constant factor.