In classical congestion games, players’ strategies are subsets of resources. We introduce and study
multiset congestion games, where players’ strategies are multisets of resources. Thus, in each strategy
a player may need to use each resource a different number of times, and his cost for using the resource
depends on the load that he and the other players generate on the resource.
Beyond the theoretical interest in examining the effect of a repeated use of resources, our study enables
better understanding of non-cooperative systems and environments whose behavior is not covered
by previously studied models. Indeed, congestion games with multiset-strategies arise, for example, in
production planing and network formation with tasks that are more involved than reachability. We study
in detail the application of synthesis from component libraries: different users synthesize systems by gluing
together components from a component library. A component may be used in several systems and
may be used several times in a system. The performance of a component and hence the system’s quality
depends on the load on it.
Our results reveal how the richer setting of multisets congestion games affects the stability and equilibrium
efficiency compared to standard congestion games. In particular, while we present very simple
instances with no pure Nash equilibrium and prove tighter and simpler lower bounds for equilibrium
inefficiency, we are also able to show that some of the positive results known for affine and weighted
congestion games apply to the richer setting of multisets.