"On the Provision of Public Goods on Networks" Dr. Parinaz Naghizadeh Ardabili, University of Michigan Wednesday, November 16, 2016 2:00 - 3:00PM EEB 248 Abstract: In this talk, I will explore how the network structure affects agents' strategic decisions towards provision of public goods on networks. We will consider three classes of effort outcomes of these network games: the Nash equilibria, Pareto efficient effort profiles, and semi-cooperative equilibria (effort profiles resulting from interactions among coalitions of agents). We identify necessary and sufficient conditions on the structure of the network for the uniqueness of the Nash equilibrium. We show that our finding unifies, and extends, existing results in the literature. We also identify conditions for the existence of Nash equilibria for the subclasses of games at the two extremes of our model, namely games of strategic complements and games of strategic substitutes. We provide a graph-theoretical interpretation of agents' efforts at the Nash equilibrium, as well as the Pareto efficient outcomes and semi-cooperative equilibria, by linking an agent's decision to her centrality in the interaction network. I will conclude with applications of these results to problems in cyber-security. Bio: Parinaz is a postdoctoral research fellow at the University of Michigan. Her research interests include game theory, mechanism design, and the study of social and economic networks, with applications to problems in cyber security. She received her Ph.D. in electrical engineering from the University of Michigan in 2016, advised by Prof. Mingyan Liu. She received her M.Sc. degrees in electrical engineering and mathematics, both from the University of Michigan, in 2013 and 2014, respectively, and her B.Sc. in electrical engineering from Sharif University of Technology, Iran, in 2010. She was a recipient of the Barbour scholarship in the 2014-15 academic year.
