NASH NETWORKS WITH IMPERFECT RELIABILITY AND HETEROGEOUS PLAYERS

This paper combines the imperfect reliability model of Bala and Goyal [2000b] with the heterogeneous player model of Galeotti et al. [2006]. We compare existence, characterization and efficiency results in the resulting framework with the results in other frameworks allowing for imperfect reliability or heterogeneity. Specifically, we compare our work with the framework of Haller and Sarangi [2005] which allows for heterogeneity in link reliability but assumes that players are homogeneous. We find, by contrast with their paper, that non existence of Nash networks is possible in our framework even if the population is very small. Moreover, although the incentives of players to maintain (or delete) links are different, in both frameworks there exist parameters such that every essential network is strict Nash and efficient.