Finite Improvement Property in a Stochastic Game Arising in Competition over Popularity in Social Networks

Abstract

This paper is a follow-up of [1]. It considers the same stochastic game that describes competition through advertisement over the popularity of their content. We show that the equilibrium may or may not be unique, depending on the system's parameters. We further identify structural properties of the equilibria. In particular, we show that a finite improvement property holds on the best response pure policies which implies the existence of pure equilibria. We further show that all pure equilibria are fully ordered in the performance they provide to the players and we propose a procedure to obtain the best equilibrium.