Under many distributed protocols, the prescribed behavior for participants is to behave greedily, that is, to repeatedly "best respond" to the others' actions. We ask the following general question: "When is it in the best interest of a long-sighted participant to adhere to a distributed greedy protocol? ". We take a game-theoretic approach and exhibit a class of games where greedy behavior (i.e., repeated best-response) is incentive compatible for all players. We identify several environments

more »

... f interest that fall within this class, thus establishing the incentive compatibility of the natural distributed greedy protocol for each. These environments include models of the Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) [4] , that handles routing on the Internet, and of the Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) [3] , and also stable-roommates assignments [2] and cost-sharing [5, 6] , that have been extensively studied in economic theory.