  Many distributed systems can be modeled as network games: a collection of
selfish players that communicate in order to maximize their individual
utilities. The performance of such games can be evaluated through the costs of
the system equilibria: the system states in which no player can increase her
utility by unilaterally changing her behavior. However, assuming that all
players are selfish and in particular that all players have the same utility
function may not always be appropriate. Hence, several extensions to
incorporate also altruistic and malicious behavior in addition to selfishness
have been proposed over the last years. In this paper, we seek to go one step
further and study arbitrary relationships between participants. In particular,
we introduce the notion of the social range matrix and explore the effects of
the social range matrix on the equilibria in a network game. In order to derive
concrete results, we propose a simplistic network creation game that captures
the effect of social relationships among players.
