Coordination mechanisms

We introduce the notion of coordination mechanisms to improve the performance in systems with independent selfish and non-colluding agents. The quality of a coordination mechanism is measured by its price of anarchy-the worst-case performance of a Nash equilibrium over the (centrally controlled) social optimum. We give upper and lower bounds for the price of anarchy for selfish task allocation and congestion games. (C) 2009 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved