English

Optimality of the coordinate-wise median mechanism for strategyproof facility location in two dimensions

Computer Science and Game Theory 2022-12-14 v5

Abstract

We consider the facility location problem in two dimensions. In particular, we consider a setting where agents have Euclidean preferences, defined by their ideal points, for a facility to be located in R2\mathbb{R}^2. We show that for the pnormp-norm (p1p \geq 1) objective, the coordinate-wise median mechanism (CM) has the lowest worst-case approximation ratio in the class of deterministic, anonymous, and strategyproof mechanisms. For the minisum objective and an odd number of agents nn, we show that CM has a worst-case approximation ratio (AR) of 2n2+1n+1\sqrt{2}\frac{\sqrt{n^2+1}}{n+1}. For the pnormp-norm social cost objective (p2p\geq 2), we find that the AR for CM is bounded above by 2322p2^{\frac{3}{2}-\frac{2}{p}}. We conjecture that the AR of CM actually equals the lower bound 211p2^{1-\frac{1}{p}} (as is the case for p=2p=2 and p=p=\infty) for any p2p\geq 2.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2007.00903,
  title  = {Optimality of the coordinate-wise median mechanism for strategyproof facility location in two dimensions},
  author = {Sumit Goel and Wade Hann-Caruthers},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2007.00903},
  year   = {2022}
}

Comments

25 pages, SAGT 2022