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Is the Price of Anarchy the Right Measure for Load-Balancing Games?

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Published:28 October 2014Publication History
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Abstract

Price of anarchy is an oft-used worst-case measure of the inefficiency of noncooperative decentralized architectures. For a noncooperative load-balancing game with two classes of servers and for a finite or infinite number of dispatchers, we show that the price of anarchy is an overly pessimistic measure that does not reflect the performance obtained in most instances of the problem. We explicitly characterize the worst-case traffic conditions for the efficiency of noncooperative load-balancing schemes and show that, contrary to a common belief, the worst inefficiency is in general not achieved in heavy traffic.

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