Forming better stable solutions in Group Formation Games inspired by Internet Exchange Points (IXPs)
Elliot Anshelevich, Wennan Zhu

TL;DR
This paper analyzes a game inspired by IXPs, showing how to form stable, cost-effective solutions through payments, and provides algorithms and bounds for achieving near-optimal stable configurations.
Contribution
It introduces a payment scheme to stabilize optimal solutions, establishes bounds relating payments to solution quality, and offers a polynomial-time approximation algorithm.
Findings
PoS of the game is at most 2
A payment scheme can stabilize the optimal solution with PoS 1
An $O(rac{ ext{log} n}{ ext{approximation ratio}})$ approximation algorithm is proposed
Abstract
We study a coordination game motivated by the formation of Internet Exchange Points (IXPs), in which agents choose which facilities to join. Joining the same facility as other agents you communicate with has benefits, but different facilities have different costs for each agent. Thus, the players wish to join the same facilities as their "friends", but this is balanced by them not wanting to pay the cost of joining a facility. We first show that the Price of Stability () of this game is at most 2, and more generally there always exists an -approximate equilibrium with cost at most of optimum. We then focus on how better stable solutions can be formed. If we allow agents to pay their neighbors to prevent them from deviating (i.e., a player voluntarily pays another player so that joins the same facility), then we provide a payment scheme which…
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Taxonomy
TopicsGame Theory and Applications · Auction Theory and Applications · Economic theories and models
