Strategic Multiway Cut and Multicut Games

We consider cut games where players want to cut themselves off from different parts of a network. These games arise when players want to secure themselves from areas of potential infection. For the game-theoretic version of Multiway Cut, we prove that the price of stability is 1, i.e., there exists a Nash equilibrium as good as the centralized optimum. For the game-theoretic version of Multicut, we show that there exists a 2-approximate equilibrium as good as the centralized optimum. We also give poly-time algorithms for finding exact and approximate equilibria in these games.

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