Bounded Budget Connection (BBC) Games or How to make friends and influence people, on a budget

Motivated by applications in social networks, peer-to-peer and overlay networks, we define and study the Bounded Budget Connection (BBC) game - we have a collection of n players or nodes each of whom has a budget for purchasing links; each link has a cost as well as a length and each node has a set of preference weights for each of the remaining nodes; the objective of each node is to use its budget to buy a set of outgoing links so as to minimize its sum of preference-weighted distances to the remaining nodes. We study the structural and complexity-theoretic properties of pure Nash equilibria in BBC games. We show that determining the existence of a pure Nash equilibrium in general BBC games is NP-hard. We counterbalance this result by considering a natural variant, fractional BBC games - where it is permitted to buy fractions of links - and show that a pure Nash equilibrium always exists in such games. A major focus is the study of (n, k)-uniform BBC games - those in which all link ...

• Type: Journal
• Year: 2008
• Where: CORR
• Authors: Nikolaos Laoutaris, Laura J. Poplawski, Rajmohan Rajaraman, Ravi Sundaram, Shang-Hua Teng
• Keywords: BBC Games, CORR 2008, Education, Pure Nash Equilibrium, Stable Graphs