Bounded Budget Betweenness Centrality Game for Strategic Network Formations

In this paper, we introduce the bounded budget betweenness centrality game, a strategic network formation game in which nodes build connections subject to a budget constraint in order to maximize their betweenness centrality, a metric introduced in the social network analysis to measure the information flow through a node. To reflect real world scenarios where short paths are more important in information exchange, we generalize the betweenness definition to only consider shortest paths of length at most `. We present both complexity and constructive existence results about Nash equilibria of the game. For the nonuniform version of the game where node budgets, link costs, and pairwise communication weights may vary, we show that Nash equilibria may not exist and it is NP-hard to decide whether Nash equilibria exist in a game instance. For the uniform version of the game where link costs and pairwise communication weights are one and each node can build k links, we construct two families of Nash equilibria based on shift graphs, and study the properties of Nash equilibria. Moreover, we study the complexity of computing best responses and show that the task is polynomial for uniform 2-BC games and NP-hard for other games.