English

Social Welfare and Price of Anarchy in Preemptive Priority Queues

Computer Science and Game Theory 2020-03-03 v2

Abstract

Consider an unobservable MG1M|G|1 queue with preemptive-resume scheduling and two priority classes. Customers are strategic and may join the premium class for a fee. We analyze the resulting equilibrium outcomes, equilibrium stability, and social welfare. We find that for service distributions with coefficient of variation greater than 1, there exists a unique and stable mixed equilibrium at low loads. We also establish a tight bound on the price of anarchy, which is 4/34/3.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2002.12914,
  title  = {Social Welfare and Price of Anarchy in Preemptive Priority Queues},
  author = {Jonathan Chamberlain and David Starobinski},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2002.12914},
  year   = {2020}
}

Comments

Submitted for publication, 8 pages