The price of anarchy in social dilemmas: Traditional research paradigms and new network applications

Research on social dilemmas has largely been concerned with whether, and under what conditions, selfish decisions by autonomous individuals jointly result in socially inefficient outcomes. By contrast, considerably less emphasis has been placed on the extent of the inefficiency in those outcomes relative to the social optimum, and how the extent of inefficiency in theory compares with what is observed in experiments or practice. In this...