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Dynamics in network interaction games

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Abstract

We study the convergence times of dynamics in games involving graphical relationships of players. Our model of interaction games generalizes a variety of recently studied games in game theory and distributed computing. In a local interaction games each agent is a node embedded in a graph and plays the same 2-player game with each neighbor. He can choose his strategy only once and must apply his choice in each 2-player game he is involved in. This represents a fundamental model of decision making with local interaction and distributed control. Furthermore, we introduce a generalization called 2-type interaction games, in which one 2-player game is played on edges and possibly another game is played on non-edges. For the popular case with symmetric 2 × 2 games, we show that several dynamics converge to a pure Nash equilibrium in polynomial time. This includes arbitrary sequential better-response dynamics, as well as concurrent dynamics resulting from a distributed protocol that does not rely on global knowledge. We supplement these results with an experimental comparison of sequential and concurrent dynamics.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Computer Science, RWTH Aachen University, Aachen, Germany

    Martin Hoefer

  2. Microsoft Research, New York, NY, USA

    Siddharth Suri

Authors
  1. Martin Hoefer
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  2. Siddharth Suri
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Correspondence to Martin Hoefer.

Additional information

An extended abstract of this work has appeared in DISC 2009 [26].

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Hoefer, M., Suri, S. Dynamics in network interaction games. Distrib. Comput. 25, 359–370 (2012). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00446-012-0171-y

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00446-012-0171-y

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