Analyzing the impact of selfish behaviors of Internet users and operators

Using the price of anarchy (PA) and the price of monopoly (PM), the impact of selfish behaviors of noncooperative users and profit seeking operators respectively are studied. Although PA characterizes the impact of complete deregulation, and PM characterizes the impact of complete regulation, this paper shows that they are related as primal and dual ratios of two correlated optimization problems. An approach to derive bounds of both these ratios is proposed, and numerical bounds of both prices are derived in simple affine settings.