by S. Goyal, H. Heidari, M. Kearns
Abstract:
We develop a game-theoretic framework for the study of competition between firms who have budgets to ``seed" the initial adoption of their products by consumers located in a social network. We identify a general property of the adoption dynamics — namely, decreasing returns to local adoption — for which the inefficiency of resource use at equilibrium (the Price of Anarchy) is uniformly bounded above, across all networks. We also show that if this property is violated the Price of Anarchy can be unbounded, thus yielding sharp threshold behavior for a broad class of dynamics. We provide similar results a new notion, the Budget Multiplier, that measures the extent that imbalances in player budgets can be amplified at equilibrium.
Reference:
Competitive contagion in networks S. Goyal, H. Heidari, M. KearnsIn Games and Economic Behavior, Elsevier, 2014
Bibtex Entry:
@Article{goyal2014competitive,
title={Competitive contagion in networks},
author={Goyal, Sanjeev and Heidari, Hoda and Kearns, Michael},
journal={Games and Economic Behavior},
year={2014},
publisher={Elsevier}}