Network Creation with Homophilic Agents

Network Creation with Homophilic Agents

Martin Bullinger, Pascal Lenzner, Anna Melnichenko

Proceedings of the Thirty-First International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence
Main Track. Pages 151-157. https://doi.org/10.24963/ijcai.2022/22

Network Creation Games are an important framework for understanding the formation of real-world networks. These games usually assume a set of indistinguishable agents strategically buying edges at a uniform price leading to a network among them. However, in real life, agents are heterogeneous and their relationships often display a bias towards similar agents, say of the same ethnic group. This homophilic behavior on the agent level can then lead to the emergent global phenomenon of social segregation. We study Network Creation Games with multiple types of homophilic agents and non-uniform edge cost, introducing two models focusing on the perception of same-type and different-type neighboring agents, respectively. Despite their different initial conditions, both our theoretical and experimental analysis show that both the composition and segregation strength of the resulting stable networks are almost identical, indicating a robust structure of social networks under homophily.
Keywords:
Agent-based and Multi-agent Systems: Algorithmic Game Theory
Agent-based and Multi-agent Systems: Noncooperative Games