Schelling Games on Graphs

Schelling Games on Graphs

Edith Elkind, Jiarui Gan, Ayumi Igarashi, Warut Suksompong, Alexandros A. Voudouris

Proceedings of the Twenty-Eighth International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence
Main track. Pages 266-272. https://doi.org/10.24963/ijcai.2019/38

We consider strategic games that are inspired by Schelling's model of residential segregation. In our model, the agents are partitioned into k types and need to select locations on an undirected graph. Agents can be either stubborn, in which case they will always choose their preferred location, or strategic, in which case they aim to maximize the fraction of agents of their own type in their neighborhood. We investigate the existence of equilibria in these games, study the complexity of finding an equilibrium outcome or an outcome with high social welfare, and also provide upper and lower bounds on the price of anarchy and stability. Some of our results extend to the setting where the preferences of the agents over their neighbors are defined by a social network rather than a partition into types.
Keywords:
Agent-based and Multi-agent Systems: Algorithmic Game Theory
Agent-based and Multi-agent Systems: Noncooperative Games