Managing competition for (public) resources in human-centric networked environments

Advances in Information and Communication Technologies have dramatically changed the role of users and resulted in unprecedented amounts of information that enrich users\´ awareness about their environment and its resources. While this broad awareness for (low-priced) limited resources can bring benefits, it also intensifies competition phenomena in distributed and uncoordinated environments, shaping, in turn, the users\´ decisions whether to compete or not. This paper investigates the uncoordinated resource selection problem and discusses how competition awareness shapes decision-making under different levels of rationality. The case of strategic and fully rational users provides benchmarks and "reference" understanding, against which other more realistic or human-centric cases are compared.