ICES: Small: Contribution Games in Social Networks

ICES：小型：社交网络中的贡献游戏

• 批准号: 1101495
• 负责人: Elliot Anshelevich
• 金额: $ 37.89万
• 依托单位: Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute
• 依托单位国家: 美国
• 项目类别: Continuing Grant
• 财政年份: 2011
• 资助国家: 美国
• 起止时间: 2011-08-01 至 2016-07-31
• 项目状态: 已结题
• 来源: https://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward?AWD_ID=1101495&HistoricalAwards=false
• 关键词: ICES; Small; Contribution; Games; Social

This project focuses on network formation by self-interested agents. Specifically, it studies contribution games in social networks, where players/nodes not only form connections/relationships with others, but also determine the intensity of their connections. This project will analyze the quality of equilibrium solutions, convergence properties of local dynamics, and mechanisms to improve these properties. This work will result in efficient algorithms for computing various reasonable outcomes of contribution games, and algorithms for "nudging" the players to form better outcomes by giving them small incentives, using approximation algorithms for otherwise intractable problems. More concretely, this research will consider the following topics. (1) Analyzing a model of Network Contribution Games that captures the essence of players optimizing their local relationships. Concepts such as Nash equilibrium are of limited usefulness for such models, so the project instead focuses on pairwise equilibrium, strong equilibrium, and convergence dynamics. (2) General Contribution Games are an important extension of network contribution games: instead of pairwise relationships, players contribute to many-person projects. (3) Centrality, Friendship, and Altruism. Other than the desire to maximize total success of all projects/relationships players are involved in, they may also desire to form connections that make them well-positioned in the social network, and so attempt to maximize some notion of "centrality" or they may care about the quality of the network as a whole, as in games with public goods. This project will analyze games where the utility of a player is a combination of such considerations, and derive general results on the structure and quality of equilibrium solutions depending on the types of player utility functions.Social networks pervade most aspects of human life, and affect everything from the spread of epidemics to the ability to find a job. Now that data on social networks has become easier to collect, understanding the structure, properties, and incentives of social network formation has become a crucial research topic. By explicitly taking into account the strength of bonds in a social network, and not just their existence, this work will add a new dimension to game-theoretic models of social networks, and obtain new insight into participant behavior, and into the structure of social networks. This work may also suggest efficient methods for "nudging" the participants of a social network to form better outcomes by giving them small incentives. In addition, this project will contribute new techniques for analyzing systems with limited collusion. The study of contribution games where participants care about centrality, friendship, and altruism in addition to their local success, will be the first major attempt to understand the structure of social networks under such a combination of player incentives. This project will include collaborations with both theoretical and applied researchers working on social networks, including researchers from complex systems, epidemiology, sociology, and the school of management. Because of wide-spread interest in social networks, this project may inspire new approaches in many of the fields mentioned above. Finally, this research will be strongly complimented by the PI's education plan, which includes teaching several courses with research components, forming a workshop on this topic, and recruiting several graduate and undergraduate students to work on this project.

该项目侧重于自利主体的网络形成。具体来说，它研究社交网络中的贡献游戏，其中玩家/节点不仅与他人形成联系/关系，而且还决定他们联系的强度。该项目将分析平衡解的质量、局部动力学的收敛特性以及改进这些特性的机制。这项工作将产生用于计算贡献游戏的各种合理结果的有效算法，以及通过给予玩家小的激励来“推动”玩家形成更好的结果的算法，使用近似算法来解决其他棘手的问题。更具体地说，本研究将考虑以下主题。 （1）分析网络贡献博弈模型，该模型抓住了玩家优化本地关系的本质。纳什均衡等概念对于此类模型的用处有限，因此该项目转而关注成对均衡、强均衡和收敛动态。 (2)通用贡献博弈是网络贡献博弈的重要延伸：玩家不再是成对的关系，而是为多人项目做出贡献。 (3) 中心性、友谊和利他主义。除了希望玩家参与的所有项目/关系取得最大成功之外，他们还可能希望建立联系，使他们在社交网络中处于有利地位，因此试图最大化“中心性”的概念，或者他们可能关心整个网络的质量，就像在公共物品游戏中一样。该项目将分析玩家的效用是这些考虑因素的组合的博弈，并根据玩家效用函数的类型得出均衡解的结构和质量的一般结果。社交网络渗透到人类生活的大多数方面，影响着从流行病的传播到找到工作的能力的一切。现在社交网络的数据变得更容易收集，理解社交网络形成的结构、属性和激励已成为一个重要的研究课题。通过明确考虑社交网络中纽带的强度，而不仅仅是它们的存在，这项工作将为社交网络的博弈论模型添加新的维度，并获得对参与者行为和社交网络结构的新见解。这项工作还可能提出有效的方法，通过给予社交网络的参与者小的激励来“推动”他们形成更好的结果。此外，该项目还将贡献用于分析有限共谋系统的新技术。对参与者除了本地成功之外还关心中心性、友谊和利他主义的贡献博弈的研究将是理解这种玩家激励组合下的社交网络结构的首次重大尝试。该项目将包括与从事社交网络研究的理论和应用研究人员合作，包括来自复杂系统、流行病学、社会学和管理学院的研究人员。由于人们对社交网络的广泛兴趣，该项目可能会激发上述许多领域的新方法。最后，这项研究将得到 PI 教育计划的大力赞扬，其中包括教授几门具有研究内容的课程，组建一个关于该主题的研讨会，并招募几名研究生和本科生来从事该项目。