Production, Attack, and Defence in Networks

Speaker(s)

Marcin Dziubiński

Affiliation

University of Warsaw

Language of the talk

English

Date

March 26, 2026, 12:30 p.m.

Room

room 4060

Seminar

Seminar Algorithmic Economics

---

We develop a framework for the study of production and appropriation. There are two stages. In the first stage, agents decide how much to invest in production. In the second stage, they allocate the remaining resources between self-defence and targeted attacks on others. We show existence and uniqueness of equilibrium. We then characterise the allocation of effort to productive effort, targeted attacks on agents and self-defence. Every individual targets more productive individuals more intensively. Consequently, low productivity individuals always earn more than high productivity individuals. We define the notion of price of conflict as the ratio of first best aggregate utility to equilibrium aggregate utility. We show that the price of conflict is unbounded in the number of agents.

---