Using Reputation in Repeated Selfish Routing with Incomplete Information

Abstract

<p>We study the application of reputation as an instigator of beneficial user behavior in selfish routing and when the network users rely on the network coordinator for information about the network. Instead of using tolls or artificial delays, the network coordinator takes advantage of the users' insufficient data, in order to manipulate them through the information he provides. The issue that arises then is what can be the coordinator's gain without compromising by too much on the trust the users put on the information provided, i.e., by maintaining a reputation for (at least some) trustworthiness.</p> <p>Our main contribution is the modeling of such a system as a repeated game of incomplete information in the case of single-commodity general networks. This allows us to apply known folk-like theorems to get bounds on the price of anarchy that are better than the well-known bounds without information manipulation.</p>