The Price of Anarchy of Strategic Queuing Systems

Bounding the price of anarchy, which quantifies the damage to social welfare due to selfish behavior of the participants, has been an important area of research in algorithmic game theory. Classical work on such bounds in repeated games makes the strong assumption that the subsequent rounds of the repeated games are independent beyond any influence on play from past history. This work studies such bounds in environments that themselves change due to the actions of the agents. Concretely, we consider this problem in discrete-time queuing systems, where competitive queues try to get their packets served. In this model, a queue gets to send a packet at each step to one of the servers, which will attempt to serve the oldest arriving packet, and unprocessed packets are returned to each queue. We model this as a repeated game where queues compete for the capacity of the servers, but where the state of the game evolves as the length of each queue varies. We analyze this queuing system from multiple perspectives. As a baseline measure, we first establish precise conditions on the queuing arrival rates and service capacities that ensure all packets clear efficiently under centralized coordination. We then show that if queues strategically choose servers according to independent and stationary distributions, the system remains stable provided it would be stable under coordination with arrival rates scaled up by a factor of just \(\frac{e}{e-1}\). Finally, we extend these results to no-regret learning dynamics: if queues use learning algorithms satisfying the no-regret property to choose servers, then the requisite factor increases to 2, and both of these bounds are tight. Both of these results require new probabilistic techniques compared to the classical price of anarchy literature and show that in such settings, no-regret learning can exhibit efficiency loss due to myopia.