The diameter of sum basic equilibria games

Abstract

We study the sum basic network creation game introduced in 2010 by Alon, Demaine, Hajiaghai and Leighton. In this game, an undirected and unweighted graph G is said to be a sum basic equilibrium if and only if, for every edge uv and any vertex $v^{\prime }$ in G, swapping edge uv with edge $u{v}^{\prime }$ does not decrease the total sum of the distances from u to all the other vertices. This concept lies at the heart of the 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. In this sense, in 2013 Alon et al. showed an upper bound of $2^{O\left(\sqrt{\log n}\right)}$ on the diameter of sum basic equilibria, and they also proved that if a sum basic equilibrium graph is a tree, then it has diameter at most 2. In this paper, we prove that the upper bound of 2 also holds for bipartite graphs and even for some non-bipartite classes like block graphs and cactus graphs.