Equilibria, information and frustration in heterogeneous network games with conflicting preferences

Interactions between people are the basis on which the structure of our society arises as a complex system and, at the same time, are the starting point of any physical description of it. In the last few years, much theoretical research has addressed this issue by combining the physics of complex networks with a description of interactions in terms of evolutionary game theory. We here take this research a step further by introducing a most salient societal factor such as the individuals’ preferences, a characteristic that is key to understanding much of the social phenomenology these days. We consider a heterogeneous, agent-based model in which agents interact strategically with their neighbors, but their preferences and payos for the possible actions dier. We study how such a heterogeneous network behaves under evolutionary dynamics and dierent strategic interactions, namely coordination games and best shot games. With this model we study the emergence of the equilibria predicted analytically in random graphs under best response dynamics, and we M Mazzoli and A Sánchez Equilibria, information and frustration in heterogeneous network games with conflicting preferences Printed in the UK 113403 JSMTC6 © 2017 IOP Publishing Ltd and SISSA Medialab srl 2017 J. Stat. Mech.