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Selfish Vector Packing

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Abstract

We study the multidimensional vector packing problem with selfish items. An item is a d-dimensional non-zero vector, whose rational components are in [0, 1]. A set of items can be packed into a bin if for every \(1 \le i \le d\), the sum of the ith components of all items of this set does not exceed 1. Items share costs of bins proportionally to the \(\ell _1\)-norms of items, and each item corresponds to a selfish player in the sense that it prefers to be packed into a bin minimizing its resulting cost. This defines a class of games called vector packing games. We show that any game in this class has a packing that is a strong equilibrium, and that both the strong price of anarchy and the strong price of stability are logarithmic in d. We also provide an algorithm that constructs a packing that is a strong equilibrium. Furthermore, we show improved and nearly tight lower and upper bounds of \(d+0.657067\) and \(d+0.657143\), respectively, for any \(d\ge 2\), on the price of anarchy. This exhibits a difference between the multidimensional problem and the one-dimensional problem, for which that price of anarchy is at most 1.6428.

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Notes

  1. This result can be generalized for \(d\ge 2\) by adding \(d-1\) zero components to each item in the instance.

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Correspondence to Leah Epstein.

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A preliminary version of this paper appeared as [20].

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Epstein, L., Kleiman, E. Selfish Vector Packing. Algorithmica 83, 2952–2988 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00453-021-00849-0

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