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The price of anarchy in cooperative network creation games. (English) Zbl 1236.68082
Albers, Susanne (ed.) et al., STACS 2009. 26th international symposium on theoretical aspects of computer science, Freiburg, Germany, February 26–28, 2009. Wadern: Schloss Dagstuhl – Leibniz Zentrum für Informatik (ISBN 978-3-939897-09-5). LIPIcs – Leibniz International Proceedings in Informatics 3, 301-312, electronic only (2009).
Summary: 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 $$\alpha$$. 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 $$\alpha$$ in complete host graphs. This bound is the first result of this type for any version of the network creation game; most previous general upper bounds are polynomial in $$n$$. Interestingly, we also show that equilibrium graphs have polylogarithmic diameter for the most natural range of $$\alpha$$ (at most $$n \text{ polylg} n$$).
Second, we study the impact of the natural assumption that the host graph is a general graph, not necessarily complete. This model is a simple example of nonuniform creation costs among the edges (effectively allowing weights of $$\alpha$$ and $$\infty$$). We prove the first assemblage of upper and lower bounds for this context, establishing nontrivial tight bounds for many ranges of $$\alpha$$, for both the unilateral and cooperative versions of network creation. In particular, we establish polynomial lower bounds for both versions and many ranges of $$\alpha$$, even for this simple nonuniform cost model, which sharply contrasts the conjectured constant bounds for these games in complete (uniform) graphs.
For the entire collection see [Zbl 1213.68019].

##### MSC:
 68Q17 Computational difficulty of problems (lower bounds, completeness, difficulty of approximation, etc.) 91A43 Games involving graphs 05C57 Games on graphs (graph-theoretic aspects) 68M10 Network design and communication in computer systems
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