Selfish Bin Packing

A pure Nash equilibrium is a packing where no agent can obtain a smaller cost by unilaterally moving his item to a different bin, while other items remain in their original positions. A Strong Nash equilibrium is a packing where there exists no subset of agents, all agents in which can profit from jointly moving their items to different bins. We say that all agents in a subset profit from moving their items to different bins if all of them have a strictly smaller cost as a result of moving, while the other items remain in their positions.

We measure the quality of the equilibria using the standard measures PoA and PoS that are defined as the worst case worst/best asymptotic ratio between the social cost of a (pure) Nash equilibrium and the cost of an optimal packing, respectively. We also consider the recently introduced measures SPoA and SPoS, that are defined similarly to the PoA and the PoS, but consider only Strong Nash equilibria.

We give nearly tight lower and upper bounds of 1.6416 and 1.6428, respectively, on the PoA of the bin packing game, improving upon
previously known results by Bilo, and establish the fact that PoS=1. We show that the bin packing game admits a Strong Nash equilibrium, and that SPoA=SPoS. We prove that this value is equal to the approximation ratio of a natural greedy algorithm for bin packing.