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Contribution Games in Social Networks

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Algorithms – ESA 2010 (ESA 2010)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNTCS,volume 6346))

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Abstract

We consider network contribution games, where each agent in a social network has a budget of effort that he can contribute to different collaborative projects. Depending on the contribution of the involved agents a project will be successful to a different degree, and to measure the success we use a reward function for each project. Every agent is trying to maximize the reward from all projects that it is involved in. We consider pairwise equilibria of this game and characterize the existence, computational complexity, and quality of equilibrium based on the types of reward functions involved. For example, when all reward functions are concave, we prove that the price of anarchy is at most 2. For convex functions the same only holds under some special but very natural conditions. A special focus of the paper are minimum effort games, where the success of a project depends only on the minimum effort of any of the participants. Finally, we briefly discuss additional aspects like approximate equilibria and convergence of dynamics.

This work was supported in part by NSF CCF-0914782, by DFG through UMIC Research Center at RWTH Aachen University, and by DFG grant Ho 3831/3-1.

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Dept. of Computer Science, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, Troy, NY

    Elliot Anshelevich

  2. Dept. of Computer Science, RWTH Aachen University, Germany

    Martin Hoefer

Authors
  1. Elliot Anshelevich
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  2. Martin Hoefer
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Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Mathematics and Computing Science, TU Eindhoven, Eindhoven, The Netherlands

    Mark de Berg

  2. Institute for Computer Science, J.W. Goethe University, 60325, Frankfurt/Main, Germany

    Ulrich Meyer

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Anshelevich, E., Hoefer, M. (2010). Contribution Games in Social Networks . In: de Berg, M., Meyer, U. (eds) Algorithms – ESA 2010. ESA 2010. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 6346. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-15775-2_14

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-15775-2_14

  • Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-642-15774-5

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-642-15775-2

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