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Documents authored by Melnichenko, Anna

Document
Track A: Algorithms, Complexity and Games
DOI: 10.4230/LIPIcs.ICALP.2022.62
Social Distancing Network Creation

Authors: Tobias Friedrich, Hans Gawendowicz, Pascal Lenzner, and Anna Melnichenko

Published in: LIPIcs, Volume 229, 49th International Colloquium on Automata, Languages, and Programming (ICALP 2022)

Abstract
During a pandemic people have to find a trade-off between meeting others and staying safely at home. While meeting others is pleasant, it also increases the risk of infection. We consider this dilemma by introducing a game-theoretic network creation model in which selfish agents can form bilateral connections. They benefit from network neighbors, but at the same time, they want to maximize their distance to all other agents. This models the inherent conflict that social distancing rules impose on the behavior of selfish agents in a social network. Besides addressing this familiar issue, our model can be seen as the inverse to the well-studied Network Creation Game by Fabrikant et al. [PODC 2003] where agents aim at being as central as possible in the created network. Thus, our work is in-line with studies that compare minimization problems with their maximization versions. We look at two variants of network creation governed by social distancing. In the first variant, there are no restrictions on the connections being formed. We characterize optimal and equilibrium networks, and we derive asymptotically tight bounds on the Price of Anarchy and Price of Stability. The second variant is the model’s generalization that allows restrictions on the connections that can be formed. As our main result, we prove that Swap-Maximal Routing-Cost Spanning Trees, an efficiently computable weaker variant of Maximum Routing-Cost Spanning Trees, actually resemble equilibria for a significant range of the parameter space. Moreover, we give almost tight bounds on the Price of Anarchy and Price of Stability. These results imply that, compared the well-studied inverse models, under social distancing the agents' selfish behavior has a significantly stronger impact on the quality of the equilibria, i.e., allowing socially much worse stable states.
Cite as

Tobias Friedrich, Hans Gawendowicz, Pascal Lenzner, and Anna Melnichenko. Social Distancing Network Creation. In 49th International Colloquium on Automata, Languages, and Programming (ICALP 2022). Leibniz International Proceedings in Informatics (LIPIcs), Volume 229, pp. 62:1-62:21, Schloss Dagstuhl – Leibniz-Zentrum für Informatik (2022)

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@InProceedings{friedrich_et_al:LIPIcs.ICALP.2022.62,
  author =	{Friedrich, Tobias and Gawendowicz, Hans and Lenzner, Pascal and Melnichenko, Anna},
  title =	{{Social Distancing Network Creation}},
  booktitle =	{49th International Colloquium on Automata, Languages, and Programming (ICALP 2022)},
  pages =	{62:1--62:21},
  series =	{Leibniz International Proceedings in Informatics (LIPIcs)},
  ISBN =	{978-3-95977-235-8},
  ISSN =	{1868-8969},
  year =	{2022},
  volume =	{229},
  editor =	{Boja\'{n}czyk, Miko{\l}aj and Merelli, Emanuela and Woodruff, David P.},
  publisher =	{Schloss Dagstuhl -- Leibniz-Zentrum f{\"u}r Informatik},
  address =	{Dagstuhl, Germany},
  URL =		{https://drops.dagstuhl.de/entities/document/10.4230/LIPIcs.ICALP.2022.62},
  URN =		{urn:nbn:de:0030-drops-164038},
  doi =		{10.4230/LIPIcs.ICALP.2022.62},
  annote =	{Keywords: Algorithmic Game Theory, Equilibrium Existence, Price of Anarchy, Network Creation Game, Social Distancing, Maximization vs. Minimization Problems}
}
Document
DOI: 10.4230/LIPIcs.FSTTCS.2020.15
Fair Tree Connection Games with Topology-Dependent Edge Cost

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

Published in: LIPIcs, Volume 182, 40th IARCS Annual Conference on Foundations of Software Technology and Theoretical Computer Science (FSTTCS 2020)

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.
Cite as

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)

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@InProceedings{bilo_et_al:LIPIcs.FSTTCS.2020.15,
  author =	{Bil\`{o}, Davide and Friedrich, Tobias and Lenzner, Pascal and Melnichenko, Anna and Molitor, Louise},
  title =	{{Fair Tree Connection Games with Topology-Dependent Edge Cost}},
  booktitle =	{40th IARCS Annual Conference on Foundations of Software Technology and Theoretical Computer Science (FSTTCS 2020)},
  pages =	{15:1--15:15},
  series =	{Leibniz International Proceedings in Informatics (LIPIcs)},
  ISBN =	{978-3-95977-174-0},
  ISSN =	{1868-8969},
  year =	{2020},
  volume =	{182},
  editor =	{Saxena, Nitin and Simon, Sunil},
  publisher =	{Schloss Dagstuhl -- Leibniz-Zentrum f{\"u}r Informatik},
  address =	{Dagstuhl, Germany},
  URL =		{https://drops.dagstuhl.de/entities/document/10.4230/LIPIcs.FSTTCS.2020.15},
  URN =		{urn:nbn:de:0030-drops-132562},
  doi =		{10.4230/LIPIcs.FSTTCS.2020.15},
  annote =	{Keywords: Network Design Games, Spanning Tree Games, Fair Cost Sharing, Price of Anarchy, Nash Equilibrium, Algorithmic Game Theory, Combinatorics}
}
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