Speaker: Paolo Guasoni
Title: Economics of Decentralization and Resilience: Hydra and Connectivity Tradeoffs
Abstract: We study the cost of maintaining decentralized connectivity in large networks when links are costly and nodes may fail. Requiring that every pair of nodes is connected by d short, internally disjoint paths, and node degrees are nearly balanced, we give an explicit construction (Hydra) which minimizes the maximum degree up to a small additive gap and achieves the minimal asymptotic number of links. The resulting edge count scales on the order of n log n, quantifying how decentralization raises connectivity costs relative to hub-based designs. (Joint work with Nazem Khan and Yufei Zhang)