Network Games
Matthew Jackson
Division of the Humanities and Social Sciences
California Institute of Technology
Wednesday, May 24, 2006
4:30 - 5:45 PM
Terman Engineering Center, Room 453
Abstract:
In a variety of contexts--ranging from public goods provision to
information collection--a person's well being depends on her own
action as well as on the actions taken by her neighbors. We develop a
framework to analyze such strategic interactions when neighborhood
structure, modeled in terms of an underlying network of connections,
affects payoffs. Our framework has two distinctive features: it permits a
variety of payoff functions and applications, and it allows for
variations in terms of how much players know about the overall network
structure. We provide a number of results characterizing how the
network structure, an individual's position within the network, the
nature of games (strategic substitutes versus complements and positive
versus negative externalities), and the level of information
(incomplete versus complete), shape individual behavior and payoffs.
Operations Research Colloquia: http://or.stanford.edu/oras_seminars.html