Equilibria and Efficiency Loss in Games on Networks

Social networks are the substrate upon which we make and evaluate many of our daily decisions: our costs and benefits depend on whether--or how many of, or which of--our friends are willing to go to that restaurant, choose that cellular provider, already own that gaming platform. Much of the research on the "diffusion of innovation," for example, takes a game-theoretic perspective on strategic decisions made by people embedded in a social context. Indeed, multiplayer games played on social networks, where the network's nodes correspond to the game's players, have proven to be fruitful models of many natural scenarios involving strategic interaction. In this paper, we embark on a mathematical and general exploration of the relationship between 2-person strategic interactions (a "base game") and a "networked" version of that same game. We formulate a generic mechanism for superimposing a symmetric 2-player base game M on a social network G: each no...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2009
• Where: CSE
• Authors: Joshua R. Davis, Zachary Goldman, Jacob Hilty, Elizabeth Koch, David Liben-Nowell, Alexa Sharp, Tom Wexler, Emma Zhou
• Keywords: CSE 2009, Pure Nash Equilibria, Social Network, Strategic Interaction, Theoretical Computer Science