The Networked Common Goods Game

  • Jinsong Tan
Conference paper
Part of the Lecture Notes in Computer Science book series (LNCS, volume 6509)

Abstract

We introduce a new class of games called the networked common goods game (NCGG), which generalizes the well-known common goods game [12]. We focus on a fairly general subclass of the game where each agent’s utility functions are the same across all goods the agent is entitled to and satisfy certain natural properties (diminishing return and smoothness). We give a comprehensive set of technical results listed as follows.

  • We show the optimization problem faced by a single agent can be solved efficiently in this subclass. The discrete version of the problem is however NP-hard but admits a fully polynomial time approximation scheme (FPTAS).

  • We show uniqueness results of pure strategy Nash equilibrium of NCGG, and that the equilibrium is fully characterized by the structure of the network and independent of the choices and combinations of agent utility functions.

  • We show NCGG is a potential game, and give an implementation of best/better response Nash dynamics that lead to fast convergence to an ε-approximate pure strategy Nash equilibrium.

  • Lastly, we show the price of anarchy of NCGG can be as large as Ω(n 1 − ε ) (for any ε> 0), which means selfish behavior in NCGG can lead to extremely inefficient social outcomes.

Keywords

Utility Function Nash Equilibrium Knapsack Problem Common Good Total Utility 
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 2010

Authors and Affiliations

  • Jinsong Tan
    • 1
  1. 1.Department of Computer and Information ScienceUniversity of PennsylvaniaPhiladelphia

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