Heavy Traffic Approximation of Equilibria in Resource Sharing Games

We consider a model of priced resource sharing that combines both queueing behavior and strategic behavior. We study a priority service model where a single server allocates its capacity to agents in proportion to their payment to the system, and users from different classes act to minimize the sum of their cost for processing delay and payment. As the exact processing time of this system is hard to compute and cannot be characterized in closed form, we introduce the notion of heavy traffic equilibrium as an approximation of the Nash equilibrium, derived by considering the asymptotic regime where the system load approaches capacity. We discuss efficiency and revenue, and in particular provide a bound for the price of anarchy of the heavy traffic equilibrium.

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