Equilibrium games in networks

It seems a universal phenomenon of networks that the attacks on a small number of nodes by an adversary player Alice may generate a global cascading failure of the networks. It has been shown (Li et al., 2013) that classic scale-free networks (Barabási and Albert, 1999, Barabási, 2009) are insecure against attacks of as small as O(logn) many nodes. This poses a natural and fundamental question: Can we introduce a second player Bob to prevent Alice from global cascading failure of the networks? We proposed a game in networks. We say that a network has an equilibrium game if the second player Bob has a strategy to balance the cascading influence of attacks by the adversary player Alice. It was shown that networks of the preferential attachment model (Barabási and Albert, 1999) fail to have equilibrium games, that random graphs of the Erdös–Rényi model (Erdös and Rényi, 1959, Erdös and Rényi, 1960) have, for which randomness is the mechanism, and that homophyly networks (Li et al., 2013) have equilibrium games, for which homophyly and preferential attachment are the underlying mechanisms. We found that some real networks have equilibrium games, but most real networks fail to have. We anticipate that our results lead to an interesting new direction of network theory, that is, equilibrium games in networks.