Bandwidth Trading Under Misaligned Objectives: Decentralized Measurement-Based Control

This paper studies the interplay between a profit-maximizing network and a number of users competing for the finite bandwidth on each link. In the authors' setting, the objectives of the network and the users are 'Misaligned', in that the prices that optimize the network's profit do not maximize the aggregate utility of the users. The links set the prices for bandwidth and the users react to them by revealing their preferred amounts of bandwidth. A first contribution of this work is an iterative procedure for a single-link model.