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Constrained heterogeneous two-facility location games with sum-variant

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Abstract

We study deterministic mechanism design for constrained heterogeneous two-facility location games. The constraint here means that the feasible locations of facilities are specified and the number of facilities that can be built at each feasible location is limited. Given that a set of agents can strategically report their locations on the real line, the authority wants to design strategyproof mechanisms (i.e., mechanisms that can incentivize agents to report truthful private information) to construct two heterogeneous facilities under constraint, while optimizing the corresponding social objectives. Assuming that each agent’s individual objective depends on the sum of her distance to facilities, we consider locating desirable and obnoxious facilities respectively. For the former, we give a deterministic group strategyproof mechanism, which guarantees 3-approximation under the objectives of minimizing the sum cost and the maximum cost. We show that no deterministic strategyproof mechanism can have an approximation ratio of less than 2 under the sum/maximum cost objective. For the latter, we give a deterministic group strategyproof mechanism with 2-approximation under the objectives of maximizing the sum utility and the minimum utility. We show that no deterministic strategyproof mechanism can have an approximation ratio of less than 3/2 under the sum utility objective and 2 under the minimum utility objective, respectively.

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Notes

  1. Here, we assume that each agent wants the sum of her distance to the two obnoxious facilities to be as large as possible and apply the sum-variant utility. If each agent prefers the nearest obnoxious facility to stay away from her as possible, it should be better to regard the distance from her to the nearest facility as her utility (referred to as min-variant).

  2. While our paper is being reviewed, the results have been improved by Kanellopoulos et al. (2023) to a matching bound under the sum/maximum cost objective.

  3. Although there always exists an optimal solution in \(\{(a_1,a_2),(a_{m-1},a_m),(a_1,a_m)\}\), the approximation ratio of locating at \((a_{1}, a_{2})\) or \((a_{m-1}, a_{m})\) is unbounded due to some extreme instances. This inspires us to propose LR-Point Mechanism.

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Funding

This research was supported in part by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (12201590, 12171444, 11971447, 11871442).

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Correspondence to Wenjing Liu.

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Zhao, Q., Liu, W., Nong, Q. et al. Constrained heterogeneous two-facility location games with sum-variant. J Comb Optim 47, 65 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10878-024-01163-5

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10878-024-01163-5

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