Communication and cooperation in public network situations
by
Peter Borm
CentER and Department of Econometrics,Tilburg University,The Netherlands
Coauthors: Herbert Hamers(Tilburg University), Maurice Koster(University of Amsterdam), Marieke Quant(University of Utrecht), Jeroen Suijs(Tilburg University)

This talk centers on sharing the costs and benefits of maintaining a public network communication structure.Benefits are assumed to be bilateral, i.e. the actual benefits of a group of agents is determined as the sum of the benefits of the pairs of those agents within this group who can directly or indirectly communicate via a sequence of communication links whose costs are accounted for by the group as a whole(an operative network).So communication links are publicly available but costly. It is assumed that agents are located at the vertices of an undirected graph in which the edges represent all possible direct communication links.This graph, the costs of the edges and the benefits of all pairs of agents are publicly known. We take the approach from cooperative game theory and focus on the corresponding network game in coalitional form which relates any coalition of players to its highest possible net benefit, i.e.to the net benefit corresponding to an optimal operative network. Although finding an optimal network in general is a difficult problem, it is shown that the corresponding network games are always (totally) balanced.In the proof of this result a specific relaxation, duality and techniques from linear production games with committee control play a role. Sufficient conditions for convexity of network games are derived; Possible extensions of the model and its results are discussed.

Date received: June 20, 2000

Copyright © 2000 by the author(s). The author(s) of this document and the organizers of the conference have granted their consent to include this abstract in Atlas Conferences Inc. Document # cafk-25.