  Deriving competitive, distributed solutions to multi-agent problems is
crucial for many developing application domains; Game theory has emerged as a
useful framework to design such algorithms. However, much of the attention
within this framework is on the study of equilibrium behavior, whereas
transient behavior is often ignored. Therefore, in this paper we study the
transient efficiency guarantees of best response processes in the context of
submodular resource allocation games, which find application in various
engineering contexts. Specifically the main focus of this paper is on
characterizing the optimal short-term system-level behavior under the
best-response process. Interestingly, the resulting transient performance
guarantees are relatively close to the optimal asymptotic performance
guarantees. Furthermore, we characterize the trade-offs that result when
optimizing for both asymptotic and transient efficiency through various utility
designs.
