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We introduce a new class of games called the networked common goods game (NCGG), which generalizes the well-known common goods game. We focus on a fairly general subclass of the game where each agent's utility functions are the same across all goods the agent is entitled to and satisfy certain natural properties (diminishing return and smoothness). We give a comprehensive set of technical results listed as follows. * We show the optimization problem faced by a single agent can be solved efficiently in this subclass. The discrete version of the problem is however NP-hard but admits an fully polynomial time approximation scheme (FPTAS). * We show uniqueness results of pure strategy Nash equilibrium of NCGG, and that the equilibrium is fully characterized by the structure of the network and independent of the choices and combinations of agent utility functions. * We show NCGG is a potential game, and give an implementation of best/better response Nash dynamics that lead to fast convergence to an $\epsilon$-approximate pure strategy Nash equilibrium. * Lastly, we show the price of anarchy of NCGG can be as large as $\Omega(n^{1-\epsilon})$ (for any $\epsilon>0$), which means selfish behavior in NCGG can lead to extremely inefficient social outcomes.

We consider inapproximability of the correlation clustering problem defined as follows: Given a graph $G = (V,E)$ where each edge is labeled either "+" (similar) or "-" (dissimilar), correlation clustering seeks to partition the vertices into clusters so that the number of pairs correctly (resp. incorrectly) classified with respect to the labels is maximized (resp. minimized). The two complementary problems are called MaxAgree and MinDisagree, respectively, and have been studied on complete graphs, where every edge is labeled, and general graphs, where some edge might not have been labeled. Natural edge-weighted versions of both problems have been studied as well. Let S-MaxAgree denote the weighted problem where all weights are taken from set S, we show that S-MaxAgree with weights bounded by $O(|V|^{1/2-\delta})$ essentially belongs to the same hardness class in the following sense: if there is a polynomial time algorithm that approximates S-MaxAgree within a factor of $\lambda = O(\log{|V|})$ with high probability, then for any choice of S', S'-MaxAgree can be approximated in polynomial time within a factor of $(\lambda + \epsilon)$, where $\epsilon > 0$ can be arbitrarily small, with high probability. A similar statement also holds for $S-MinDisagree. This result implies it is hard (assuming $NP \neq RP$) to approximate unweighted MaxAgree within a factor of $80/79-\epsilon$, improving upon a previous known factor of $116/115-\epsilon$ by Charikar et. al. \cite{Chari05}.

Given a bipartite graph $G = (V_1,V_2,E)$ where edges take on {\it both} positive and negative weights from set $\mathcal{S}$, the {\it maximum weighted edge biclique} problem, or $\mathcal{S}$-MWEB for short, asks to find a bipartite subgraph whose sum of edge weights is maximized. This problem has various applications in bioinformatics, machine learning and databases and its (in)approximability remains open. In this paper, we show that for a wide range of choices of $\mathcal{S}$, specifically when $| \frac{\min\mathcal{S}} {\max \mathcal{S}} | \in \Omega(\eta^{\delta-1/2}) \cap O(\eta^{1/2-\delta})$ (where $\eta = \max\{|V_1|, |V_2|\}$, and $\delta \in (0,1/2]$), no polynomial time algorithm can approximate $\mathcal{S}$-MWEB within a factor of $n^{\epsilon}$ for some $\epsilon > 0$ unless $\mathsf{RP = NP}$. This hardness result gives justification of the heuristic approaches adopted for various applied problems in the aforementioned areas, and indicates that good approximation algorithms are unlikely to exist. Specifically, we give two applications by showing that: 1) finding statistically significant biclusters in the SAMBA model, proposed in \cite{Tan02} for the analysis of microarray data, is $n^{\epsilon}$-inapproximable; and 2) no polynomial time algorithm exists for the Minimum Description Length with Holes problem \cite{Bu05} unless $\mathsf{RP=NP}$.