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Abstract:
We continue the study of the effects of selfish behavior in the
network design problem.
We provide new bounds for the price of stability for network design with
fair cost allocation for undirected graphs. We consider the most general
case, for which the best known upper bound is the Harmonic number
$H_n$, where $n$ is the number of agents,
and the best previously known lower bound is $12/7\approx1.778$.
We present a nontrivial lower bound of $42/23\approx1.8261$.
Furthermore,
we show that for two players, the price of stability is exactly $4/3$, while for
three players it is at least $74/48\approx 1.542$ and at most $1.65$.
These are the first improvements on the bound of $H_n$ for general networks.
In particular, this demonstrates a separation between the price of
stability on undirected graphs and that on directed graphs,
Previously, such a gap was only known for the cases where all players
have a shared source, and for weighted players.
