The Diameter of Sum Basic Equilibria Games

Abstract

A graph $G$ of order $n$ is said to be a sum basic equilibrium if and only if for every edge $uv$ from $G$ and any node $v'$ from $G$, when performing the swap of the edge $uv$ for the edge $uv'$, the sum of the distances from $u$ to all the other nodes is not strictly reduced. This concept lies in the heart of the so-called network creation games, where the central problem is to understand the structure of the resulting equilibrium graphs, and in particular, how well they globally minimize the diameter. It was shown in [Alon, Demaine, Hajiaghayi, Leighton, SIAM J. Discrete Math. 27(2), 2013] that the diameter of sum basic equilibria is $2^{O(\sqrt{\log n})}$ in general, and at most $2$ for trees. In this paper we show that the upper bound of $2$ can be extended to bipartite graphs, and that it also holds for some nonbipartite classes like block graphs and cactus graphs.