Journal of the ACM (JACM)
The price of anarchy is independent of the network topology
STOC '02 Proceedings of the thiry-fourth annual ACM symposium on Theory of computing
The economics of information security investment
ACM Transactions on Information and System Security (TISSEC)
Convex Optimization
Efficiency Loss in a Network Resource Allocation Game
Mathematics of Operations Research
Inoculation strategies for victims of viruses and the sum-of-squares partition problem
SODA '05 Proceedings of the sixteenth annual ACM-SIAM symposium on Discrete algorithms
Competition and Efficiency in Congested Markets
Mathematics of Operations Research
A local mean field analysis of security investments in networks
Proceedings of the 3rd international workshop on Economics of networked systems
Efficiency of selfish investments in network security
Proceedings of the 3rd international workshop on Economics of networked systems
STACS'99 Proceedings of the 16th annual conference on Theoretical aspects of computer science
Aegis: a novel cyber-insurance model
GameSec'11 Proceedings of the Second international conference on Decision and Game Theory for Security
Modeling internet security investments: tackling topological information uncertainty
GameSec'11 Proceedings of the Second international conference on Decision and Game Theory for Security
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We study a network security game where strategic players choose their investments in security. Since a player's investment can reduce the propagation of computer viruses, a key feature of the game is the positive externality exerted by the investment. With selfish players, unfortunately, the overall network security can be far from optimum. The contributions of this paper are as follows. 1) We first characterize the price of anarchy (POA) in the strategic-form game under an "Effective-investment" model and a "Bad-traffic" model, and give insight on how the POA depends on individual players' cost functions and their mutual influence. We also introduce the concept of "weighted POA" to bound the region of payoff vectors. 2) In a repeated game, players have more incentive to cooperate for their long term interests. We consider the socially best outcome that can be supported by the repeated game, as compared to the social optimum. 3) Next, we compare the benefits of improving security technology and improving incentives, and show that improving technology alone may not offset the price of anarchy. 4) Finally, we characterize the performance of correlated equilibrium (CE). Although the paper focuses on network security, many results are generally applicable to games with positive externalities.