Recent incidents of cybersecurity violations have revealed the importance of having firewalls and other intrusion detection systems to monitor traffic entering and leaving access networks. But the adoption of such security measures is often stymied by ‘free-riding’ effects and ‘shortsightedness’ among Internet service providers (ISPs). In this work, we develop an analytical framework that not o...

I investigate the intersection of selfish routing and the preferential attachment social network. In particular, through the use of a stochastic generative preferential attachment model, a collection abstract network patterns are created for the transfer of flow from one distinct source destination vertex pair. Then, using a linear approximation method, I calculate both Nash and system optimal ...

I defend the claim, made in a previous paper, that ‘a Humean can be a contractarian’, against the criticisms of Anthony de Jasay. Jasay makes a categorical distinction between ‘ordered anarchy’ (which he associates with Hume) and ‘social contract theory’. I argue that Hume’s political position was conservative, not anarchist. On Hume’s analysis, a convention is an implicit agreement; the concep...

We consider a network of sellers, each selling a single product, where the graph structure represents pair-wise complementarities between products. We study how the network structure affects revenue and social welfare of equilibria of the pricing game between the sellers. We prove positive and negative results, both of “Price of Anarchy” and of “Price of Stability” type, for special families of...

We address several recent developments in non-cooperative as well as evolutionary game theory, that give a new viewpoint to Complex Systems understanding. In particular, we discuss notions like the anarchy cost, equilibria formation, social costs and evolutionary stability. We indicate how such notions help in understanding Complex Systems behaviour when the system includes selfish, antagonisti...

This paper contributes to debates around the political potential of social media by examining Occupy Wall Street and activist’s use of Facebook. Drawing on concepts rooted in cybernetics and anarchist political theory, the paper argues that the shift in Occupy Wall Street from being a physical protest camp in late 2011 to an online movement in 2012 coincided with a shift in social media activit...

Social networks on the Internet have seen an enormous growth recently and play a crucial role in different aspects of today’s life. They have facilitated information dissemination in ways that have been beneficial for their users but they are often used strategically in order to spread information that only serves the objectives of particular users. These properties have inspired a revision of ...

We study assignment games in which jobs select machines, and in which certain pairs of jobs may conflict, which is to say they may incur an additional cost when they are both assigned to the same machine, beyond that associated with the increase in load. Questions regarding such interactions apply beyond allocating jobs to machines: when people in a social network choose to align themselves wit...

We investigate a non-cooperative game-theoretic model for the formation of communi-cation networks by selfish agents. Each agent aims for a central position at minimumcost for creating edges. In particular, the general model (Fabrikant et al., PODC’03)became popular for studying the structure of the Internet or social networks. De-spite its significance, locality in this gam...

To ensure that social networks (e.g. opinion consensus, cooperative estimation, distributed learning and adaptation etc.) proliferate and efficiently operate, the participating agents need to collaborate with each other by repeatedly sharing information. However, sharing information is often costly for the agents while resulting in no direct immediate benefit for them. Hence, lacking incentives...