agents exchanging information/knowledge and studying what networks emerge endogenously as a result of self-organizing cognitive agents. Since many applications can use the presented model, we do not delve on the idiosyncratic details of specific applications. The rest of the paper is organized as follows. In Section II, we formalize the network formation game among agents in a CIN. Section III characterizes the emerging stable networks when the link formation costs are homogeneous, and the efficiency of such networks are investigated. Section IV analyzes the network topology and equilibrium efficiency for the case of heterogeneous link costs. The joint information production and link formation game is studied in Section V. Suggested future extensions for our model are provided in Section VI. Finally, conclusions are drawn in Section VII.

Basic Model
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In this section, we discuss the problem setting and propose a basic model to formulate the endogenous network formation game emerging among cognitive agents.

Information model
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Let $\mathcal{N}=\{1,2,3,...,N\}$ be the set of agents in the CIN. Each agent $i$ possesses exogenous information in the form of a discrete random variable $X_{i}$ and aims to form links with other agents to maximize its utility, which is defined as the benefit 