The Price of Anarchy in Cooperative Network Creation Games

We analyze the structure of equilibria and the price of anarchy in the family of network creation games considered extensively in the past few years, which attempt to unify the network design and network routing problems by modeling both creation and usage costs. In general, the games are played on a host graph, where each node is a selfish independent agent (player) and each edge has a fixed link creation cost α. Together the agents create a network (a subgraph of the host graph) while selfishly minimizing the link creation costs plus the sum of the distances to all other players (usage cost). In this paper, we pursue two important facets of the network creation game. First, we study extensively a natural version of the game, called the cooperative model, where nodes can collaborate and share the cost of creating any edge in the host graph. We prove the first nontrivial bounds in this model, establishing that the price of anarchy is polylogarithmic in n for all values of α in co...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2009
• Where: STACS
• Authors: Erik D. Demaine, MohammadTaghi Hajiaghayi, Hamid Mahini, Morteza Zadimoghaddam
• Keywords: Host Graph, Link Creation Costs, Network Creation Game, STACS 2009, Theoretical Computer Science