  Designing distributed algorithms for multi-agent problems is vital for many
emerging application domains, and game-theoretic approaches are emerging as a
useful paradigm to design such algorithms. However, much of the emphasis of the
game-theoretic approach is on the study of equilibrium behavior, whereas
transient behavior is often less explored. Therefore, in this paper we study
the transient efficiency guarantees of best response processes in the context
of resource-allocation games, which are used to model a variety of engineering
applications. Specifically, the main focus of the paper is on designing utility
functions of agents to induce optimal short-term system-level behavior under a
best-response process. Interestingly, the resulting transient performance
guarantees are relatively close to the optimal asymptotic performance
guarantees. Furthermore, we characterize a trade-off that results when
optimizing for both asymptotic and transient efficiency through various utility
designs.
