| Title | Solution Quality in Routing and Network Formation Games |
| Speaker | Prof. Éva Tardos, Cornell University |
| Web page | http://www.cs.cornell.edu/People/eva/eva.html |
| Time | Thursday, March 9, 3:00pm |
| Location | SSL 150 |
Traditional network design assumes that the network designer has the information and power to decide on the whole network. However, many networks operate and evolve through interactions of large numbers of participants. Such networks play a fundamental role in many domains, ranging from communication networks to social networks. In this talk we will consider settings where multiple agents each pursue their own selfish interests, each represented by his own objective function, caring only about his cost and his part of the network. We will consider settings modeling routing and network formation. In each setting our goal is to quantify the degradation of quality of solution caused by the selfish behavior of users, comparing the selfish outcome to a centrally designed optimum, or comparing outcomes with different levels of cooperation.