This paper studies an online path selection problem and proposes online mechanisms for a network operator to sequentially update link prices. The aim is to incentivize online-arriving agents to join the network and select paths in a manner that maximizes the social welfare, which comprises both system profit and the quality of service experienced by agents. Competitive analysis is adopted to analyze the performance of the proposed online mechanism, whose best achievable competitive ratio is 4. Sufficient and necessary conditions on a competitive mechanism are established. Moreover, the performance limit of the celebrated multiplethe- index pricing scheme is also analyzed.
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Cao et al. (2024) studied this question.
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