Cost-sharing mechanisms for network design

Anupam Gupta, Aravind Srinivasan, Éva Tardos

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingChapter

Abstract

We consider a single source network design problem from a game-theoretic perspective. Gupta, Kumar and Roughgarden (Proc. 35th Annual ACM STOC, pages 365-372, 2003) developed a simple method for single source rent-or-buy problem that also yields the best-known approximation ratio for the problem. We show how to use a variant of this method to develop an approximately budget-balanced and group strategyproof cost-sharing method for the problem. The novelty of our approach stems from our obtaining the cost-sharing methods for the rent-or-buy problem by carefully combining cost-shares for the simpler problem Steiner tree problem; we feel that this idea may have wider implications. Our algorithm is conceptually simpler than the previous such cost-sharing method due to Pal and Tardos (Proc. 44th Annual FOCS, pages 584-593, 2003), and has a much improved approximation factor of 4.6 (over the previously known factor of 15).

Original languageEnglish (US)
Title of host publicationLecture Notes in Computer Science (including subseries Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence and Lecture Notes in Bioinformatics)
EditorsKlaus Jansen, Sanjeev Khanna, Jose D. P. Rolim, Dana Ron
PublisherSpringer Verlag
Pages139-150
Number of pages12
ISBN (Print)3540228942, 9783540228943
DOIs
StatePublished - 2004

Publication series

NameLecture Notes in Computer Science (including subseries Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence and Lecture Notes in Bioinformatics)
Volume3122
ISSN (Print)0302-9743
ISSN (Electronic)1611-3349

ASJC Scopus subject areas

  • Theoretical Computer Science
  • General Computer Science

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