  Mechanisms such as auctions and pricing schemes are utilized to design
strategic (noncooperative) games for networked systems. Although the
participating players are selfish, these mechanisms ensure that the game
outcome is optimal with respect to a global criterion (e.g. maximizing a social
welfare function), preference-compatible, and strategy-proof, i.e. players have
no reason to deceive the designer. The mechanism designer achieves these
objectives by introducing specific rules and incentives to the players; in this
case by adding resource prices to their utilities. In auction-based mechanisms,
the mechanism designer explicitly allocates the resources based on bids of the
participants in addition to setting prices. Alternatively, pricing mechanisms
enforce global objectives only by charging the players for the resources they
have utilized. In either setting, the player preferences represented by utility
functions may be coupled or decoupled, i.e. they depend on other player's
actions or only on player's own actions, respectively. The unified framework
and its information structures are illustrated through multiple example
resource allocation problems from wireless and wired networks.
