Authors:
Constantinos Varsos
1
;
2
;
Michail Fasoulakis
2
;
Giorgos Flouris
2
and
Marina Bitsaki
1
Affiliations:
1
Department of Computer Science, University of Crete, Heraklion, Greece
;
2
Institute of Computer Science, FORTH, Vasilika Vouton, Heraklion, Greece
Keyword(s):
Game Theory, Misinformation Games, Mechanism Design, Coordination Mechanisms, Information in Games, Non-atomic Congestion Games with Parallel Links.
Abstract:
We introduce a novel approach for coordination mechanisms in games, based on the idea of misinforming players about the game formulation in order to steer them towards a behaviour that leads to an improved outcome in terms of social welfare. As a use case, we study single-commodity non-atomic congestion games with parallel links and affine cost functions. We propose a simple mechanism that provides to the players the right incentives to adopt a socially optimal behaviour by misinforming them with regards to the latency functions of the links, under various assumptions. We use a metric called the Price of Misinformation to quantify the effect of misinformation on social welfare (compared to the optimum of the actual game), and show that our mechanism can minimise this metric, resulting in values that are better than the Price of Anarchy (i.e., the social outcome without any intervention from the designer).