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Fair Tree Connection Games with Topology-Dependent Edge Cost

Authors Davide Bilò , Tobias Friedrich , Pascal Lenzner , Anna Melnichenko , Louise Molitor

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Davide Bilò
  • Department of Humanities and Social Sciences, University of Sassari, Via Roma 151, 07100 Sassari (SS), Italy
Tobias Friedrich
  • Hasso Plattner Institute, University of Potsdam, Prof.-Dr.-Helmert-Straße 2-3, 14482 Potsdam, Germany
Pascal Lenzner
  • Hasso Plattner Institute, University of Potsdam, Prof.-Dr.-Helmert-Straße 2-3, 14482 Potsdam, Germany
Anna Melnichenko
  • Hasso Plattner Institute, University of Potsdam, Prof.-Dr.-Helmert-Straße 2-3, 14482 Potsdam, Germany
Louise Molitor
  • Hasso Plattner Institute, University of Potsdam, Prof.-Dr.-Helmert-Straße 2-3, 14482 Potsdam, Germany

Acknowledgements

We thank Warut Suksompong for many interesting discussions. Moreover, we are grateful to our anonymous reviewers for their valuable suggestions. This work has been partly supported by COST Action CA16228 European Network for Game Theory (GAMENET).

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Davide Bilò, Tobias Friedrich, Pascal Lenzner, Anna Melnichenko, and Louise Molitor. Fair Tree Connection Games with Topology-Dependent Edge Cost. In 40th IARCS Annual Conference on Foundations of Software Technology and Theoretical Computer Science (FSTTCS 2020). Leibniz International Proceedings in Informatics (LIPIcs), Volume 182, pp. 15:1-15:15, Schloss Dagstuhl – Leibniz-Zentrum für Informatik (2020)
https://doi.org/10.4230/LIPIcs.FSTTCS.2020.15

Abstract

How do rational agents self-organize when trying to connect to a common target? We study this question with a simple tree formation game which is related to the well-known fair single-source connection game by Anshelevich et al. (FOCS'04) and selfish spanning tree games by Gourvès and Monnot (WINE'08). In our game agents correspond to nodes in a network that activate a single outgoing edge to connect to the common target node (possibly via other nodes). Agents pay for their path to the common target, and edge costs are shared fairly among all agents using an edge. The main novelty of our model is dynamic edge costs that depend on the in-degree of the respective endpoint. This reflects that connecting to popular nodes that have increased internal coordination costs is more expensive since they can charge higher prices for their routing service. In contrast to related models, we show that equilibria are not guaranteed to exist, but we prove the existence for infinitely many numbers of agents. Moreover, we analyze the structure of equilibrium trees and employ these insights to prove a constant upper bound on the Price of Anarchy as well as non-trivial lower bounds on both the Price of Anarchy and the Price of Stability. We also show that in comparison with the social optimum tree the overall cost of an equilibrium tree is more fairly shared among the agents. Thus, we prove that self-organization of rational agents yields on average only slightly higher cost per agent compared to the centralized optimum, and at the same time, it induces a more fair cost distribution. Moreover, equilibrium trees achieve a beneficial trade-off between a low height and low maximum degree, and hence these trees might be of independent interest from a combinatorics point-of-view. We conclude with a discussion of promising extensions of our model.

Subject Classification

ACM Subject Classification
  • Theory of computation → Algorithmic game theory
  • Theory of computation → Quality of equilibria
  • Theory of computation → Convergence and learning in games
  • Theory of computation → Network formation
Keywords
  • Network Design Games
  • Spanning Tree Games
  • Fair Cost Sharing
  • Price of Anarchy
  • Nash Equilibrium
  • Algorithmic Game Theory
  • Combinatorics

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