Incentive-based search for efficient equilibria of the public goods game

摘要

The "best-shot" public goods game is a network game, defined on a social network. The simple version of the public goods game (PGG) has a fixed utility for a player who has at least a single neighbor buying the good. Players in the general version of PGG have additional utility when multiple neighbors purchase the good. The general version of the public goods game is shown to be a potential game, establishing the convergence to a stable state (i.e., a pure Nash equilibrium - PNE) by best-response dynamics. One can think of best-response dynamics as a distributed algorithm that runs in a fixed order of players/agents and is guaranteed to converge to a PNE.