Forming networks of strategic agents with desired topologies

  • Authors:
  • Swapnil Dhamal;Yadati Narahari

  • Affiliations:
  • Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore, India;Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore, India

  • Venue:
  • WINE'12 Proceedings of the 8th international conference on Internet and Network Economics
  • Year:
  • 2012

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Abstract

Many networks such as social networks and organizational networks in global companies consist of self-interested agents. The topology of these networks often plays a crucial role in important tasks such as information diffusion and information extraction. Consequently, growing a stable network having a certain topology is of interest. Motivated by this, we study the following important problem: given a certain desired network topology, under what conditions would best response (link addition/deletion) strategies played by self-interested agents lead to formation of a stable network having that topology. We study this interesting reverse engineering problem by proposing a natural model of recursive network formation and a utility model that captures many key features. Based on this model, we analyze relevant network topologies and derive a set of sufficient conditions under which these topologies emerge as pairwise stable networks, wherein no node wants to delete any of its links and no two nodes would want to create a link between them.