It's Not Whom You Know, It's What You, or Your Friends, Can Do: Coalitional Frameworks for Network Centralities

We investigate the representation of game-theoretic measures of network centrality using a framework that blends a social network representation with the formalism of cooperative skill games. We discuss the expressiveness of the new framework and highlight some of its advantages, including a fixed-parameter tractability result for computing centrality measures under such representations. As an application we introduce new network centrality measures that capture the extent to which neighbors of a certain node can help it complete relevant tasks.