On capacity sharing in network congestion epochs

Seeing network resources as a public good involves to mantain open and shared access to them for any user. Nevertheless, these conditions may be really difficult to achieve in presence of well-endowed users with heavy data flows. Our purpose here is to provide a two stage game form for managing heavy data flows which may cause network congestion or monopolization. Using an axiomatic approach, we show that the mechanism proposed attains economic efficiency and it implements capacity sharing. Copyright Kluwer Academic Publishers 2004