Dynamic Games in Novel Networks: Guest Editors’ Forewords

Abstract

An increasing number of man-made networked systems, such as social networks and online platforms, govern the interactions between players through predefined actions such as the possibility of sharing informations, accessing a service, express opinions or preferences. Ultimately, the evolution of such systems is determined by strategic interactions developing over complex structures. Strategic interactions, which take place at the local level, e.g., in a node’s neighborhood, finally emerge to determine global system configurations. This special issue has collected a set of contributions, which are inspired by this general framework. In this broad context, two contributions in this special issue are focused on network effects. In particular, coordination games are used as atomic representation of imitation behavior of playerswhichmay propagate or not in an interconnected system, e.g., across a social network. Khan et al. study the influence of network topology on the emergence of efficient equilibria in coordination games and explore numerically the convergence time to such configurations. Conversely, Peeters et al. focus on the effect of information diffusion by considering global interaction and confine imitation to the neighborhood of players. The individual choice of customers of a queuing system is studied in the paper authored by Wiecek and Altman, where the authors develop a theory which captures existence of threshold-type policies in the decision to join or not to join a queue. The authors also study the role of the amount of information about the queue backlog available at customers upon their arrival to the queue. Shimkin andAltman study a game of timing between a randomnumber of content creators, who compete for position and exposure time over a sharedmedium such as an online classified list.