Contention Issues in Congestion Games

We study time-dependent strategies for playing congestion games. The players can time their participation in the game with the hope that fewer players will compete for the same resources. We study two models: the boat model, in which the latency of a player is influenced only by the players that start at the same time, and the conveyor belt model in which the latency of a player is affected by the players that share the system, even if they started earlier or later; unlike standard congestion games, in these games the order of the edges in the paths affect the latency of the players. We characterize the symmetric Nash equilibria of the games with affine latencies of networks of parallel links in the boat model and we bound their price of anarchy and stability. For the conveyor belt model, we characterize the symmetric Nash equilibria of two players on parallel links. We also show that the games of the boat model are themselves congestion games. The same is true for the games of two players for the conveyor belt model; however, for this model the games of three or more players are not in general congestion games and may not have pure equilibria.