Designing Network Protocols for Good Equilibria

Designing and deploying a network protocol determines the rules by which end users interact with each other and with the network. The authors consider the problem of designing a protocol to optimize the equilibrium behavior of a network with selfish users. The authors consider network cost sharing games, where the set of Nash equilibria depends fundamentally on the choice of an edge cost-sharing protocol. Previous research focused on the Shapley protocol, in which the cost of each edge is shared equally among its users.