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Main Authors: Kanellopoulos, Panagiotis, Voudouris, Alexandros A.
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
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Online Access:https://arxiv.org/abs/2505.03391
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author Kanellopoulos, Panagiotis
Voudouris, Alexandros A.
author_facet Kanellopoulos, Panagiotis
Voudouris, Alexandros A.
contents We study a truthful facility location problem where one out of $k\geq2$ available facilities must be built at a location chosen from a set of candidate ones in the interval $[0,1]$. This decision aims to accommodate a set of agents with private positions in $[0,1]$ and approval preferences over the facilities; the agents act strategically and may misreport their private information to maximize their utility, which depends on the chosen facility and their distance from it. We focus on strategyproof mechanisms that incentivize the agents to act truthfully and bound the best possible approximation of the optimal social welfare (the total utility of the agents) they can achieve. We first show that deterministic mechanisms have unbounded approximation ratio, and then present a randomized mechanism with approximation ratio $k$, which is tight even when agents may only misreport their positions. For the restricted setting where agents may only misreport their approval preferences, we design a deterministic mechanism with approximation ratio of roughly $2.325$, and establish lower bounds of $3/2$ and $6/5$ for deterministic and randomized mechanisms, respectively.
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institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Truthful Facility Location with Candidate Locations and Limited Resources
Kanellopoulos, Panagiotis
Voudouris, Alexandros A.
Computer Science and Game Theory
We study a truthful facility location problem where one out of $k\geq2$ available facilities must be built at a location chosen from a set of candidate ones in the interval $[0,1]$. This decision aims to accommodate a set of agents with private positions in $[0,1]$ and approval preferences over the facilities; the agents act strategically and may misreport their private information to maximize their utility, which depends on the chosen facility and their distance from it. We focus on strategyproof mechanisms that incentivize the agents to act truthfully and bound the best possible approximation of the optimal social welfare (the total utility of the agents) they can achieve. We first show that deterministic mechanisms have unbounded approximation ratio, and then present a randomized mechanism with approximation ratio $k$, which is tight even when agents may only misreport their positions. For the restricted setting where agents may only misreport their approval preferences, we design a deterministic mechanism with approximation ratio of roughly $2.325$, and establish lower bounds of $3/2$ and $6/5$ for deterministic and randomized mechanisms, respectively.
title Truthful Facility Location with Candidate Locations and Limited Resources
topic Computer Science and Game Theory
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2505.03391