Abstract
Most work in algorithmic game theory assumes that players ignore costs incurred by their fellow players. In this paper, we consider superimposing a social network over a game, where players are concerned with minimizing not only their own costs, but also the costs of their neighbors in the network. We aim to understand how properties of the underlying game are affected by this alteration to the standard model. The new social game has its own equilibria, and the price of civil society denotes the ratio of the social cost of the worst such equilibrium relative to the worst Nash equilibrium under standard selfish play. We initiate the study of the price of civil society in the context of a simple class of games. Counterintuitively, we show that when players become less selfish (optimizing over both themselves and their friends), the resulting outcomes may be worse than they would have been in the base game. We give tight bounds on this phenomenon in a simple class of load-balancing games, over arbitrary social networks, and present some extensions.
This work was supported by NSF grant CCF-0728779 and was underwritten in part by grants in support of undergraduate research from Carleton, Denison, and Oberlin. Thanks to Dev Gupta, Jason Hartline, and Thanh Nguyen for helpful discussions.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
References
Ashlagi, I., Krysta, P., Tennenholtz, M.: Social Context Games. In: Proc. Workshop on Internet and Network Economics, pp. 675–683 (2008)
Awerbuch, B., Azar, Y., Epstein, A.: The Price of Routing Unsplittable Flow. In: Proc. Symposium on Theory of Computing, pp. 57–66 (2005)
Caragiannis, I., Flammini, M., Kaklamanis, C., Kanellopoulos, P., Moscardelli, L.: Tight Bounds for Selfish and Greedy Load Balancing. In: Bugliesi, M., Preneel, B., Sassone, V., Wegener, I. (eds.) ICALP 2006. LNCS, vol. 4051, pp. 311–322. Springer, Heidelberg (2006)
Chen, P.-A., Kempe, D.: Altruism, Selfishness, and Spite in Traffic Routing. In: Proc. Conference on Electronic Commerce, pp. 140–149 (2008)
Christodoulou, G., Koutsoupias, E.: On the Price of Anarchy and Stability of Correlated Equilibria of Linear Congestion Games. In: Brodal, G.S., Leonardi, S. (eds.) ESA 2005. LNCS, vol. 3669, pp. 59–70. Springer, Heidelberg (2005)
Christodoulou, G., Koutsoupias, E.: The Price of Anarchy of Finite Congestion Games. In: Proc. Symposium on Theory of Computing, pp. 67–73 (2005)
Fotakis, D., Kontogiannis, S., Spirakis, P.: Selfish Unsplittable Flows. Theoretical Computer Science 348(2), 226–239 (2005)
Gairing, M., Lücking, T., Mavronicolas, M., Monien, B., Rode, M.: Nash Equilibria in Discrete Routing Games with Convex Latency Functions. Journal of Computer Systems Science 74(7), 1199–1225 (2008)
Hayrapetyan, A., Tardos, É., Wexler, T.: The Effect of Collusion in Congestion Games. In: Proc. Symposium on Theory of Computing, pp. 89–98 (2006)
Kothari, A., Suri, S., Tóth, C.D., Zhou, Y.: Congestion Games, Load Balancing, and Price of Anarchy. In: Proc. Workshop on Combinatorial and Algorithmic Aspects of Networking (2004)
Koutsoupias, E., Papadimitriou, C.H.: Worst-Case Equilibria. In: Proc. Symposium on Theoretical Aspects of Computer Science, pp. 404–413 (1999)
Lücking, T., Mavronicolas, M., Monien, B., Rode, M.: A New Model for Selfish Routing. Theoretical Computer Science 406(3), 187–206 (2008)
Meier, D., Oswald, Y.A., Schmid, S., Wattenhofer, R.: On the Windfall of Friendship: Inoculation Strategies on Social Networks. In: Proc. Conference on Electronic Commerce, pp. 294–301 (2008)
Monderer, D., Shapley, L.S.: Potential Games. Games and Economic Behavior 14, 124–143 (1996)
Putnam, R.: Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community. Simon & Schuster (2000)
Rosenthal, R.W.: A Class of Games Possessing Pure-Strategy Nash Equilibria. International Journal of Game Theory 2, 65–67 (1973)
Roughgarden, T., Tardos, É.: How Bad is Selfish Routing? Journal of the ACM (2002)
Silk, J.: Cooperation Without Counting: The Puzzle of Friendship. In: Hammerstein, P. (ed.) Genetic and Cultural Evolution of Cooperation, pp. 37–54. MIT Press (2003)
Suri, S., Tóth, C.D., Zhou, Y.: Selfish Load Balancing and Atomic Congestion Games. Algorithmica 47(1), 79–96 (2007)
Watts, D.J., Strogatz, S.H.: Collective Dynamics of ‘Small-World’ Networks. Nature 393, 440–442 (1998)
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2011 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg
About this paper
Cite this paper
Buehler, R. et al. (2011). The Price of Civil Society. In: Chen, N., Elkind, E., Koutsoupias, E. (eds) Internet and Network Economics. WINE 2011. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 7090. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-25510-6_32
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-25510-6_32
Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg
Print ISBN: 978-3-642-25509-0
Online ISBN: 978-3-642-25510-6
eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)