Congestion games: Equilibria, convergence and complexity

Congestion games model the allocation of resources by selfish players. For example, players aim at allocating shortest paths in a network. The cost (delay) of a resource (edge) is assumed to be a function of the congestion, i.e., the number of players allocating the resource. We survey results about the existence and complexity of Nash equilibria in different variants of congestion games. Towards this end, we draw a connection to the complexity of local search and elaborate on the complexity class PLS (polynomial local search).