On the value of coordination in distributed decision making

We discuss settings where several "agents" combine efforts to solve problems. This is a well-known setting in distributed artificial intelligence. Our work addresses theoretical questions in this model which are motivated by the work of Deng and Papadimitriou [Proc. 12th IFIPS Congress, Madrid, 1992; Proc. World Economic Congress, Moscow, 1992]. We consider optimization problems, in particular load balancing and virtual circuit routing, in which the input is divided among the agents. An underlying directed graph, whose nodes are the agents, defines the constraints on the information each agent may have about the portion of the input held by other agents. The questions we discuss are as follows: Given a bound on the maximum out-degree in this graph, which is the best graph? What is the quality of the solution obtained as a function of the maximum out-degree?