DISC 2009: Distributed Computing pp 294-308 | Cite as

Dynamics in Network Interaction Games

  • Martin Hoefer
  • Siddharth Suri
Conference paper
Part of the Lecture Notes in Computer Science book series (LNCS, volume 5805)

Abstract

We study the convergence times of dynamics in games involving graphical relationships of players. Our model of local interaction games generalizes a variety of recently studied games in game theory and distributed computing. In a local interaction game each agent is a node embedded in a graph and plays the same 2-player game with each neighbor. He can choose his strategy only once and must apply his choice in each game he is involved in. This represents a fundamental model of decision making with local interaction and distributed control. Furthermore, we introduce a generalization called 2-type interaction games, in which one 2-player game is played on edges and possibly another game is played on non-edges. For the popular case with symmetric 2 ×2 games, we show that several dynamics converge in polynomial time. This includes arbitrary sequential better response dynamics, as well as concurrent dynamics resulting from a distributed protocol that does not rely on global knowledge. We supplement these results with an experimental comparison of sequential and concurrent dynamics.

Keywords

Nash Equilibrium Dominant Strategy Convergence Time Coordination Game Evolutionary Game Theory 
These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.
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Copyright information

© Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2009

Authors and Affiliations

  • Martin Hoefer
    • 1
  • Siddharth Suri
    • 2
  1. 1.Department of Computer ScienceRWTH Aachen UniversityGermany
  2. 2.Yahoo! ResearchNew YorkUSA

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