Strategic Network Formation Through an Intermediary
Strategic Network Formation Through an Intermediary
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通过中介机构形成战略网络
DOI：
10.1007/s00224-018-09906-8
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发表时间：
2015
影响因子：
0.5
通讯作者：
K. Kar
中科院分区：
文献类型：
--
作者：
Elliot Anshelevich;Onkar Bhardwaj;K. Kar
独立的自利主体相互之间形成联系的设置是非常常见的，通常使用网络形成游戏来建模。我们研究了网络形成博弈的自然扩展，其中节点不能自己形成连接，而是必须通过中介来形成连接，并且必须支付中介来形成这些连接。假设中介机构收取的价格是由其运营成本决定的，而运营成本又取决于其促成的连接总量。我们研究了在这些情况下稳定解的存在性和最坏情况效率（无政府状态的价格），特别是当中介使用常见的定价方案时，如比例定价或边际成本定价。对于这两种定价方案，我们证明了稳定解的存在性，完整地刻画了它们的结构，并将这些结果推广到一大类定价方案。我们的主要结果是在这种情况下限制无政府状态的价格：我们表明，虽然边际成本定价导致的上限只有2，即稳定的解决方案总是接近最优，比例定价也表现得相当好，只要中介的运营成本不是太凸。
Settings in which independent self-interested agents form connections with each other are extremely common, and are usually modeled using network formation games. We study a natural extension of network formation games in which the nodes cannot form connections themselves, but instead must do it through an intermediary, and must pay the intermediary to form these connections. The price charged by the intermediary is assumed to be determined by its operating costs, which in turn depend on the total amount of connections it facilitates. We investigate the existence and worst-case efficiency (price of anarchy) of stable solutions in these settings, and especially when the intermediary uses common pricing schemes like proportional pricing or marginal cost pricing. For both these pricing schemes we prove existence of stable solutions and completely characterize their structure, as well as generalize these results to a large class of pricing schemes. Our main results are on bounding the price of anarchy in such settings: we show that while marginal cost pricing leads to an upper bound of only 2, i.e., stable solutions are always close to optimal, proportional pricing also performs reasonably well as long as the operating costs of the intermediary are not too convex.