 Strategic Path Reliability in Information NetworksRajgopal Kannan, Sudipta Sarangi and S. S. Iyengar No 298, Discussion Papers of DIW Berlin from DIW Berlin, German Institute for Economic Research Abstract: We consider a model of an information network where nodes can fail and transmission of information is costly. The formation of paths in such networks is modeled as the Nash equilibrium of an N player routing game. The task of obtaining this equilibrium is shown to be NP-Hard. We derive analytical results to identify conditions under which the equilibrium path is congruent to well known paths such as the most reliable or cheapest neighbor path. The issue of characterizing off-equilibrium paths in the game is addressed and different path utility metrics proposed. Our first metric measures the degree of individual node suboptimality by evaluating paths in terms of the weakness of the worst-off player. It is shown that there exist information networks not containing paths of weakness less than Vr/3. Consequently, guaranteeing approximate equilibrium paths of bounded weakness is computationally difficult. We next propose a team game with players having a common payoff function whose equilibrium outcome can be computed in polynomial time. Finally, a fair team game with bounded payoffdifference is proposed whose equilibrium is also easily computable. Keywords: Nash Networks; Equilibrium Complexity; Team Games (search for similar items in EconPapers) Downloads: (external link) Related works: Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:diw:diwwpp:dp298 Access Statistics for this paper More papers in Discussion Papers of DIW Berlin from DIW Berlin, German Institute for Economic Research Contact information at EDIRC. |
Is your work missing from RePEc? Here is how to contribute.
Questions or problems? Check the EconPapers FAQ or send mail to .
EconPapers is hosted by the
School of Business at Örebro University.