Local and global price of anarchy of graphical games

This paper initiates a study of connections between local and global properties of graphical games. Specifically, we introduce a concept of local price of anarchy that quantifies how well subsets of agents respond to their environments. We then show several methods of bounding the global price of anarchy of a game in terms of the local price of anarchy. All our bounds are essentially tight. © 2010 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.