Price of anarchy for the N-player competitive cascade game with submodular activation functions

Abstract

We study the Price of Anarchy (PoA) of the competitive cascade game following the framework proposed by Goyal and Kearns in [11]. Our main insight is that a reduction to a Linear Threshold Model in a time-expanded graph establishes the submodularity of the social utility function. From this observation, we deduce that the game is a valid utility game, which in turn implies an upper bound of 2 on the (coarse) PoA. This cleaner understanding of the model yields a simpler proof of a much more general result than that established by Goyal and Kearns: for the N-player competitive cascade game, the (coarse) PoA is upper-bounded by 2 under any graph structure. We also show that this bound is tight. © 2013 Springer-Verlag.