Network Interventions: Targeting Agents or Targeting Links?

2026-02-13

Technology Category

• Game Theory and Economic Paradigms: Mechanism Design
• Multiagent Systems: Mechanism Design
• Planning, Routing, and Scheduling: Optimization of Spatio-temporal Systems

Application Category

• Economics, Online Markets and Human Computation: Incentives in network design for Web infrastructures and ecosystems
• Social Networks and Social Media: Social media analysis through the lenses of networks
• Graph Algorithms and Modeling for the Web: Representation, reconstruction, and subgraph or motif discovery in Web-related graphs

Abstract

Consider a network game with linear best responses and spillovers between players, and let agents endogenously choose their links. A planner considers interventions to subsidize actions and/or links between players, aiming to maximize a welfare function depending on equilibrium actions. The structure of the optimal intervention depends on whether links provide non-negative intrinsic value to agents. When they do, it is optimal to focus only on subsidizing actions. When the intrinsic value of links is negative, we give conditions for including link subsidies to be optimal. This reverses the basic structure of the optimal intervention in settings with exogenous links.

Problem

• network interventions
• endogenous links
• linear best responses
• spillovers
• welfare maximization

Innovation

• network interventions
• endogenous links
• linear best responses
• spillovers
• optimal subsidy