We study the Nash Social Welfare problem: Given n agents with valuation functions vi:2[m]→R, partition [m] into S1,…,Sn so as to maximize (∏i=1nvi(Si))1/n. The problem has been shown to admit a constant-factor approximation for additive, budget-additive, and piecewise linear concave separable valuations; the case of submodular valuations is open. We provide a e1(1−e1)2-approximation of the {\em optimal value} for several classes of submodular valuations: coverage, sums of matroid rank functions, and certain matching-based valuations.
@article{arxiv.2101.02278,
title = {Estimating the Nash Social Welfare for coverage and other submodular valuations},
author = {Wenzheng Li and Jan Vondrak},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2101.02278},
year = {2021}
}