Local Coordination and the Geometry of Social Networks

2026-02-13

Technology Category

• Game Theory and Economic Paradigms: Coordination and Collaboration
• Multiagent Systems: Coordination and Collaboration
• Constraint Satisfaction and Optimization: Distributed CSP/Optimization

Application Category

• Economics, Online Markets and Human Computation: Incentives in network design for Web infrastructures and ecosystems
• Graph Algorithms and Modeling for the Web: Efficient manipulation of static and dynamic Web-related graphs
• Social Networks and Social Media: Social media analysis through the lenses of networks

Abstract

We study agents playing a pure coordination game on a large social network. Agents are restricted to coordinate locally, without access to a global communication device, and so different regions of the network will converge to different actions, precluding perfect coordination. We show that the extent of this inefficiency depends on the network geometry: on some networks, near-perfect efficiency is achievable, while on others welfare is strictly bounded away from the optimum. We provide a geometric condition on the network structure that characterizes when near-efficiency is attainable. On networks in which it is unattainable, our results more generally preclude high correlations between outcomes in a large spectrum of dynamic games.

Problem

• local coordination
• social networks
• network geometry
• coordination games
• efficiency loss

Innovation

• local coordination
• network geometry
• efficiency loss
• dynamic games
• pure coordination game