  Designing an optimal network topology while balancing multiple, possibly
conflicting objectives like cost, performance, and resiliency to viruses is a
challenging endeavor, let alone in the case of decentralized network formation.
We therefore propose a game-formation technique where each player aims to
minimize its cost in installing links, the probability of being infected by a
virus and the sum of hopcounts on its shortest paths to all other nodes.
  In this article, we (1) determine the Nash Equilibria and the Price of
Anarchy for our novel network formation game, (2) demonstrate that the Price of
Anarchy (PoA) is usually low, which suggests that (near-)optimal topologies can
be formed in a decentralized way, and (3) give suggestions for practitioners
for those cases where the PoA is high and some centralized control/incentives
are advisable.
