Three selfish spanning tree games

Abstract

We study a problem in a network. The input is an edge-weighted graph G∈=∈(V,E) such that V contains a specific source node r. Every v ∈ V\{r} is an entity which wants to be connected to r either directly or via other entities. The main question is how do the entities deviate from a socially optimal network if they are not monitored by a central authority. We provide theoretical bounds on the (strong) price of anarchy of this game. In particular, three variants - each of them being motivated by a practical situation - are studied. © 2008 Springer Berlin Heidelberg.