Playing the Wrong Game: Bounding Externalities in Diverse Populations of Agents

Abstract

The robustness of multiagent systems can be affected by mistakes or behavioral biases (e.g., risk-aversion, altruism, toll-sensitivity), with some agents playing the "wrong game." This can change the set of equilibria, and may in turn harm or improve the social welfare of agents in the system. We are interested in bounding what we call the biased price of anarchy (BPoA) in populations with diverse agent behaviors, which is the ratio between welfare in the "wrong" equilibrium and optimal welfare. We study nonatomic routing games, and derive an externality bound that depends on a key topological parameter of the underlying network. We then prove two general BPoA bounds for games with diverse populations: one that relies on the network structure and the average bias of all agents in the population, and one that is independent of the structure but depends on the maximal bias. Both types of bounds can be combined with known results to derive concrete BPoA bounds for a variety of specific behaviors (e.g., varied levels of risk-aversion).