2011 | OriginalPaper | Chapter
The Snowball Effect of Uncertainty in Potential Games
Authors : Maria-Florina Balcan, Florin Constantin, Steven Ehrlich
Published in: Internet and Network Economics
Publisher: Springer Berlin Heidelberg
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Uncertainty is present in different guises in many settings, in particular in environments with strategic interactions. However, most game-theoretic models assume that players can accurately observe interactions and their own costs. In this paper we quantify the effect on social costs of two different types of uncertainty: adversarial perturbations of small magnitude to costs (effect called the Price of Uncertainty (PoU) [3]) and the presence of several players with Byzantine, i.e. arbitrary, behavior (effect we call the Price of Byzantine behavior (PoB)). We provide lower and upper bounds on PoU and PoB in two well-studied classes of potential games: consensus games and set-covering games.